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WALT WHITMAN 

Modeled in clay by Sidney H. Morse, 1887 



Camden's Compliment 



TO 



WALT WHITMAN 



MAY 31, 1889 

Notes, Addresses, Letters, 
Telegrams 



edited by 
HORACE L. TRAUBEL 



PHILADELPHIA 

DAVID McKAY, Publisher 

23 South Ninth Street 

1889 






Copyright, 1 889, by 
Horace L. Traubel. 



Rights reserved. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Autobiographic Note . . Walt Whitman 4 

Response .... Walt Whitman 5 

To Walt Whitman (Poem) . Ernest Rhys 6 

" Recorders Ages Hence " . Horace L. Tranbel 7 

Addresses • ' 19 

Letters : Over-Sea — Over-Land . . . .47 

By Wire : Then, Postscript . . . .69 



(3) 



AUTOBIOGRAPHIC Note. From an old "remembrance copy." 

Was born May 31, 18 1 9, in my father's farm-house, at West Hills, L. I., 
New York State. My parents' folks mostly farmers and sailors — on my 
father's side, of English — on my mother's, (Van Velsor's,) from Hollandic 
immigration. There was, first and last, a large family of children ; (I was 
the second.) We moved to Brooklyn while I was still a little one in frocks 
— and there in B. I grew up out of the frocks — then, as child and boy, went 
to the public schools — then to work in a printing office. 

When only sixteen or seventeen years old, and for two years afterward, I 
went to teaching country schools down in Queens and Suffolk counties, Long 
Island, and " boarded round." Then, returning to New York, worked as 
printer and writer, (with an occasional shy at "poetry.") 

1 848-' 9. — About this time went off on a leisurely journey and working ex- 
pedition (my brother Jeff with me,) through all the Middle States, and down 
the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Lived a while in New Orleans, and worked 
there. (Have lived quite a good deal in the Southern States.) After a time, 
plodded back northward, up the Mississippi, the Missouri, &c, and around 
to, and by way of, the great lakes, Michigan, Huron and Erie, to Niagara 
Falls and lower Canada — finally returning through Central New York, and 
down the Hudson. 

1851-54. — Occupied in house-building in Brooklyn. (For a little of the 
first part of that time in printing a daily and weekly paper.) 

1855. — Lost my dear father, this year, by death. . . . Commenced putting 
Leaves of Grass to press, for good — after many MS. doings and undoings — (I 
had great trouble in leaving out the stock " poetical " touches — but succeeded 
at last.) 

1862. — In December of this year went down to the field of War in Virginia. 
My brother George reported badly wounded in the Fredericksburgh fight. 
(For 1863 and '64, see Specimen Days.) 

1865 to '71. — Had a place as clerk (till well on in '73) in the Attorney 
General's Office, Washington. 

(New York and Brooklyn seem more like home, as I was born near, and 
brought up in them, and lived, man and boy, for 30 years. But I lived some 
years in Washington, and have visited, and partially lived, in most of the 
Western and Eastern cities.) 

1873. — This year lost, by death, my dear, dear mother — and, just before, my 
sister Martha — (the two best and sweetest women I have ever seen or known, 
or ever expect to see.) 

Same year, a sudden climax and prostration from paralysis. Had been 
simmering inside for several years; broke out during those times temporarily 
and then went over. But now a serious attack, beyond cure. Dr. Drinkard, 
my Washington physician, (and a first-rate one,) said it was the result of too 
extreme bodily and emotional strain continued at Washington and " down in 
front," in 1863, '4 and '5. I doubt if a heartier, stronger, healthier physique 
ever lived, from 1840 to '70. My greatest call (Quaker) to go around and do 
what I could among the suffering and sick and wounded was that I seem'd 
to be so strong and well. (I considered myself invulnerable.) Quit work at 
Washington, and moved to Camden, New Jersey — where I have lived since, 
and now, (September, 1889,) write these lines. 

(A long stretch of illness, or half-illness, with some lulls. During these 
latter, have revised and printed over all my books — bro't out " November 
Boughs " — and at intervals travelled to the Prairie States, the Rocky Moun- 
tains, Canada, to New York, to my birthplace in Long Island, and to Boston. 
But physical disability and the war-paralysis above alluded to have settled 
upon me more and more, the last year or so.) W. W. 

(4) 



At the Complimentary Dinner, Camden, 
New Jersey, May 31, 1889. 

WALT WHITMAN* SAID: MY FRIENDS, THOUGH ANNOUNCED TO GIVE AN 
ADDRESS, THERE IS NO SUCH INTENTION. FOLLOWING THE IMPULSE 
OF THE SPIRIT (FOR I AM AT LEAST HALF OF QUAKER STOCK), I 
HAVE OBEYED THE COMMAND TO COME AND LOOK AT YOU, FOR A 
MINUTE, AND SHOW MYSELF, FACE TO FACE; WHICH IS PROBABLY THE 
BEST I CAN DO. BUT I HAVE FELT NO COMMAND TO MAKE A SPEECH ; 
AND SHALL NOT THEREFORE ATTEMPT ANY. ALL I HAVE FELT THE 
IMPERATIVE CONVICTION TO SAY I HAVE ALREADY PRINTED IN MY 
BOOKS OF POEMS OR PROSE; TO WHICH I REFER ANY WHO MAY BE 
CURIOUS. AND SO, HAIL AND FAREWELL. DEEPLY ACKNOWLEDGING 
THIS DEEP COMPLIMENT, WITH MY BEST RESPECTS AND LOVE TO YOU 
PERSONALLY — TO CAMDEN — TO NEW-JERSEY, AND TO ALL REPRE- 
SENTED HERE — YOU MUST EXCUSE ME FROM ANY WORD FURTHER. 

* Verbatim reprint of his own slip : see page 22* 



(5) 



To Walt Whitman, from some younger English 
Friends, on his Seventieth Birthday, 31st May, 
1889. 

Here health we pledge you in one draught of song, 

Caught in this rhyms'er's cup from earth's delight, 

Where English fields are green the whole year long, — 

The wine of might, 

That the new-come spring distils, most sweet and strong, 

In the viewless air' 's alembic, thafs wrought too fine for sight. 

Good health ! we pledge, that care may lightly sleepy 

And pain of age be gone for this one day, 

As of this loving cup you take, and, drinking deep, 

Are glad at heart straightway 

To feel once more the friendly heat of the sun 

Creative in you, (as when in youth it shone,') 

And pulsing brainward with the rhythmic wealth 

Of all the summer whose high mi?istrelsy 

Shall soon crown field and tree, 

To call back age to youth again, and pain to perfect health. 

ERNEST RHYS. 

London, 1889. 



(6) 



"RECORDERS AGES HENCE." 

Gathered here, as if sharing one with another a sacred pres- 
ence — children in common of an event in which as we run we 
may read lustrous omens — are addresses, letters and briefer 
greetings, pitched in various heart-tones, which combine to what 
has proved a great social rather than literary or artistic ejfect. 

No record of Walt Whitman can be extricated from its human 
entanglements. Walt Whitman can never be rendered in spe- 
cial explanations. Notable in his friendships has been his breadth 
of resource, and remarkable, therefore, in this compilation, is its 
exhibition of variety. To apologize for so pregnant a character- 
istic would be to turn shamefaced from Walt Whitman's first 
quality. 

A few special notes would seem pertinent at this point. The 
addresses from Henry L. Bonsall, Hamlin Garland and Lin- 
coln L. Eyre, though exigently crowded out of the list at the 
banquet, demand and are accorded place in this chronicle. 
While a portion of the letters received in season were read, and 
many of them were printed in the local papers, and some few 
even entered into general circulation, it has been left for this 
vehicle to present a comparatively perfect collection of the mes- 
sages contributed. Some of the letters and telegrams which ap- 
pear were sent direct to Walt Whitman, some few to divers mem- 
bers of the arrangement committee, and the main bulk to me. 
The greetings from abroad, while naturally coming in their own 
time, often after the event, enter by born, credentials into honor 
and position. It has not been so much the purpose in this pub- 
lication to charge the banquet direct with exclusive possession 
of the day, as to bring together, using the banquet as rallying- 
point, the really remarkable salutes, hastened from all quarters, 

(7) 



8 "RECORDERS AGES HENCE." 

in Europe and America, both to Walt Whitman and to his 
friends in charge of the celebration. Reproduced now in union, 
they suggest that a power, the most solid and significant in the 
poetic history of our time, is back of Walt Whitman's fame. 
The specification of sources alone strikes those with wonder who 
have slightingly or insufficiently known his clientele. It is to 
give shape and permanency to such testimony that this volume 
is produced. 

After it was definitely decided to celebrate Walt Whitman's 
birthday by some sort of public meeting, and after the question 
of the nature of that meeting had been settled, urgent and care- 
ful preparations were at once begun. Originating with a near 
group of Walt Whitman's friends, who conceived clearly the ap- 
propriateness of such an inclusive acknowledgment, there was no 
intermission of labor till the achieved event itself satisfied them 
that their plans had been wisely laid. Several business meetings 
were held. A committee, composed of H. L. Bonsall, Thomas 
B. Harned, Geoffrey Buckwalter, Alex. G. Cattell, Louis T. 
Derousse, E. A. Armstrong, Wilbur F. Rose and Cyrus H. K. 
Curtis — all local men — was intrusted with the executive work. 
A circular, describing the purpose in view, was signed by H. L. 
Bonsall and Thomas B. Harned, and liberally issued, indistin- 
guishably to near and remote parties. Walt Whitman was well 
aware of most that transpired. The circumspection that his 
physical condition imposes assumed, in our eyes, at this period, 
a special importance, lest by some unforeseen turn he should be 
kept away from the meeting, and we thereby miss the crown of 
the feast. There arose details which from time to time were re- 
ferred to him. Fortunately for the completeness of the event, 
so much depending upon his physical condition, May 31st hailed 
him refreshed from a good night's rest, and made that certain 
which up to the last moment had raised a natural solicitude. 
The day was warm and capricious, but in the hours of his transit 
there was no storm, and nature smiled on us even from clouded 
brows. 

Morgan's Hall, with its plain portals, never before had lent 



"RECORDERS AGES HENCE." g 

itself to an occasion as large and radical as this. Had every 
man gone there without one articulated word shaped to the pur- 
pose, to those who knew by and for what the celebration was 
caused, and to the world that will one day insist upon confessing 
its lax hospitality, there floods a significance that lifts the spirit 
into high regions. Who but caught the sniff of victory in the 
air? Let the mind's eye run along the line of events from that 
far year 1855 t0 tne nour of this latest gathering — from the earli- 
est tracings of Walt Whitman's inimitable sweet courage, when 
the world held its nose, afraid to smell of the natural divinities, 
when tradition broke with its rough sword into the very song 
of the poet, along the evidence of the gradual achievement of 
friends, the yielding point by point of the protests of error and 
antipathy, the clustering, and fiery admonitory speech, of great 
souls early to greet the world's new summoner : of O'Connor, 
ample in speech and life, free to all invitations of freedom in 
his great brother-spokesman, and so liberal of the joy of liberty 
that the world almost feared, as the world always does the first 
note of release, his jubilant song ; he in some respects the largest, 
the most intrepid, the most unswerving spirit in the literature of 
the age : of Burroughs, the philosopher of woods, who came 
upon Whitman as upon a divinity of the fresh solitudes that drew 
,and enjoined, and who from the day that awoke him has been 
calmly steadfast to his glorious vision. These things, and many 
others closely related, have not only done much to give direc- 
tion to literary genuineness, but have vastly affected the general 
history of America. The full power of the influence will not in 
our day be perceived. This evening, however, radiant hints of 
it were written upon the walls, curved in and out the folds of the 
pendant flags, and shared the miracle of the vines along the 
tables that bore the feast. 

A wise forethought prompted the choice of early evening — 
running from five o'clock on — as best serving the convenience of 
hosts and guest. Many came markedly before the suggested 
hour, to linger along conversationally into the general proceed- 
ings. As cannot be too clearly understood, this was not designed 
to be, and was not, a mere craft dinner, celebrating a literary 



10 "RECORDERS AGES HENCE." 

consummation. To one who belonged in the district, the famil- 
iar faces of townsmen were right and left. These townsmen 
were lawyers, officials, commercial authorities, assembled out of 
the every-day interests of the place, and formed the bulk of the 
diners. In the half-hour that preceded the banquet, the upper 
rooms of the building arrayed notable groups, and served as a 
broad field for introductions. The drink on the table, the negro 
attendants, the assiduity of the committeemen (still gravely so- 
licitous), were minor facts to remember. The irrepressible re- 
porter was at work with the first arrival. Richard Watson Gil- 
der, Julian Hawthorne, Hamlin Garland, and other distant com- 
ers, were distinctly centres of interest. Here were men promi- 
nent in the political life of Philadelphia, men known in her 
courts, men engaged in her large trade enterprises and interested 
in her philanthropies ; and observantly intermingling with all 
these, editors who kept in the background of apparent participa- 
tion, but who had come leaving all but eyes and ears at home. 
From across the river were also a dozen figures of young men do- 
ing handiwork in a rising literature, and not unnoted John Fos- 
ter Kirk, veteran in his own right and veteran by memory of the 
great Prescott. Not to mention all, yet not to spare Johnston, 
of New York, gloriously devoted beyond any statement that 
could be made here ; McKay, explicitly now Whitman's pub- 
lisher, who will be best remembered for his connection with 
Whitman after the period of the Osgood ignominy ; Harrison S. 
Morris, one of the newer men, whose service and recognition 
has been a growing quantity — let me pass on, naming half a 
dozen who stand very close to Whitman, and deserve more than 
a casual deference : Gilchrist, for one, who, now happily in 
America, could give from British lips, and as if out of generous 
memory of his famous mother, a tender of the unfailing British 
remembrance of Whitman ; for another, Francis Howard Wil- 
liams, loyal in Whitman's first years in this latitude, when to be 
loyal and an affectionate host served an imminent need and was 
a title of nobility ; and still more, Clifford, himself a philoso- 
pher, product of New England's best influences, out of his pro- 
found knowledge of the human side of literature realizing and 



"RECORDERS AGES HENCE." n 

incessantly proclaiming Whitman's true stature among the proph- 
ets, while confirmed in all convictions by his affectionate per- 
sonal contact with the seer ; and here, too, Harned, whose faith 
and service, grown not only of proximity but of natural tenden- 
cies, have been an unbroken testimony, and Bonsall, through 
many years of journalistic experience missing no opportunity for 
the frankest espousal of Whitman, and Buckwalter, who, with 
these other adjacent two, had labored so ardently to project and 
to further this celebration. The predominating activity of these 
men threw everything that transpired into an atmosphere of per- 
sonal affection. This had been a guarantee invoked from the 
first. 

Whitman himself was not to come to share the feast. He 
needed to husband his strength. He was more necessary to the 
success of the after-addresses. Following the chat of the groups 
in the reception rooms, there resulted, upon a whispered hint 
which quickly circulated, a quiet flow of people to the hall be- 
low. Three tables had there been spread, two almost the full 
length of the floor, and one crossing them at the head, set apart 
for those who were to speak, and so arranged that any speaker 
could at once face the whole line of the guests. The music on 
the platform, the banners on the walls, the flowers on the table 
— a bouquet at each plate, and clusters here and there — united 
to enrich the impression of the hour. Yet nothing was elaborate, 
and there was no ostentation. On the menu card a phototype 
portrait of Whitman stood felicitously alone, without name or 
word to any effect ; and within, opposing (or uniting) influences, 
foodstuffs ranged as "The Feast of Reason," and matters of 
speech as " The Flow of Soul. ' ' The afternoon was warm. The 
wax tapers gleamed with persistent uncertainty. The winds out 
of doors kept up a rather ominous melody. Everybody had it 
in mind that, after all, this was interim, that the real message- 
bearer was yet to come, and that, in our dining, we were merely 
halting on a journey. With this consciousness everywhere pre- 
vailing, an hour passed. Good humor was plenty, and talk was 
free. Was Walt Whitman sure to come ? Penetrating all else, 



12 "RECORDERS AGES HENCE:' 

this was upon questioning lips and passed like a charge from man 
to man. 

Walt Whitman was sure to come — yes ! Bye-and-bye the hint 
was given that he had been sent for — then, after the lapse of ten 
minutes or so, interspersed with further murmur all around the 
room, a policeman's cry, almost inaudible, near the door, " He's 
coming ! " The intelligence rapidly spread ; every man turned, 
napkin in hand, expectant and absorbed. Chair and guest, car- 
ried together up-stairs by two capable policemen, were wheeled 
into the hall, Whitman's Canadian friend and nurse, Edward 
Wilkins, guiding. Whitman responded at once to the intense 
but ineffusive reception by removing his hat and waving it right 
and left. The whole audience, risen to its feet, but saying noth- 
ing, gave him a reverent welcome. How deep that moment of 
silence ! Not till later on were the cheers given, but when given 
they were given several times, and vehemently. Once Mr. 
Corning arose with humorous deliberation and said it was on his 
conscience that we ought to give three cheers for Walt Whitman ; 
and three better cheers than followed never greeted any man. 
But now, on his entrance, the first to accost Whitman was a col- 
ored woman, assisting with the culinary apparatus, who rushed 
impetuously at him. I thought Whitman's initial expression a 
wearied one, but he was composed, and not slow in getting his 
place at the head of the room. At this juncture there was a spon- 
taneous clapping of hands, after which a general resumption of 
seats. The guest kept his own chair, which was wheeled up 
against the table. At his right, in order, were Gilder and Gil- 
christ ; at his left Grey, the chairman, Garland, Hawthorne, 
Garrison and Clifford. Horned, Williams, Bonsall and Eyre 
were at the long tables. 

It was interesting to note that Walt Whitman, who had come 
to stay "fifteen minutes to half an hour," stayed from two to 
three hours. There is no doubt but that the aspect of the assem- 
blage inspired and invigorated him. While it was true in the 
best sense that the occasion owed everything to him, it was also 
true, in another and minor sense, that he was indebted to it for 
at least a part of his present almost exhilaration. For, looking 



"RECORDERS AGES HENCE." 



13 



down the long line, the almost crowded tables, it was a subtle 
influence caught up out of each face, a pervading, living quality 
in each eye, that for the time being (and, as I believe, for days 
afterwards — perhaps as lasting even to-day) electrically imparted 
strength and glow to heart and limb. For this was the year 
1889, the city was one not famous in general or literary an- 
nals, and a deference, which, if prophesied for Walt Whitman 
a quarter of a century ago, would have been deemed preposter- 
ous, now issued out of the most unpretending environment. So 
comes a prophet at last who defeats the old proverb.. And this 
Walt Whitman must in some measure have recognized, for he is 
a man whom mere appearances never deceive — a man who meas- 
ures good and ill with the same calm austerity. 

Now the speaking commenced. The placid chairman, Samuel 
H. Grey, came first with his address of welcome. Walt Whit- 
man's little speech was brought in as a response to this, and as a 
general message for those, whether present or absent, who had 
thought well to recognize the day. Then were introduced in 
their order, not exactly as announced on the programme, but as 
they are now placed, Thomas B. Harned, Herbert H. Gilchrist, 
Francis Howard Williams, John H. Clifford, Charles G. Garri- 
son, E. A. Armstrong, Richard Watson Gilder and Julian Haw- 
thorne. As the addresses progressed, the scene warmed. Along 
down the hall men sat sidewise against the tables. The report- 
ers all clustered in the foreground. Many smoked cigars, chairs 
were tipped, everything appeared un trammeled. After the 
momentary expression of weariness Whitman's whole manner 
changed to an absorbed ease. He dealt affectionately by a special 
bottle of champagne that was brought him. His own speech 
(which he had had printed on slips, and of which, with an inter- 
lined addition, he gave me copies liberally for the reporters) 
was read, while not powerfully, with a beautiful simplicity, ease 
and sweetness. His part from that time forward was the part of 
a child. Sentiments that touched him in the utterances of others 
drew forth little exclamations of attention or approval or even of 
dissent. He threw his own presence out into a striking objec- 
tivity. Sometimes he would applaud with his bottle there on the 



14 



"RECORDERS AGES HENCE." 



table. Strangely, to-day he was black-coated. The glory of his 
hair dispensed with a forced nimbus. In front of him had been 
set a basket of exquisite flowers, out of which, selecting special 
samples, which he again and again raised to his nose, he seemed 
to take much enjoyment. It was characteristic of him that, sev- 
eral times, having messages to deliver, he signalled me across the 
hall. Seeing him so comfortable, the guests were eased. Social 
tyrannies relaxed. Taking air of Whitman's presence, there pre- 
vailed the port and ring of an exquisite freedom. 

The controlling vocal manner was a rich union of the elements 
of perception and emotion, which as a characteristic is perhaps 
unprecedentedly remarkable and living in Walt Whitman's 
works and in the man himself. He has since remarked : "I was 
averse to the public dinner at the outset, but said I should ' let 
the boys have their own way.' " And so " the boys " had their 
own way, and Whitman rescued the occasion by being one of 
"the boys" himself. Details, running into his little interposed 
remarks, are barely possible here. There was no break in the 
proceedings as long as he remained. Had he stayed till mid- 
night the rally of his friends would have continued. But that 
was not to be. We were singularly and unexpectedly blessed in 
holding him as long as we did. He kept his place till Haw- 
thorne had spoken, and Ingersoll's telegram, delivered to me in 
the hall and read by Clifford, had had its strong and pithy effect. 
His desire to withdraw was quickly though not formally commu- 
nicated to the meeting. He slowly arose from his chair; Gilder 
and I helped him on with his big blue wrapper. Every man was 
on his feet in an instant. The chairman, standing in the centre 
of a thick group, said he would ask George Pierie, who was pres- 
ent (and who is known for much odd and piquant experience in 
journalist clubs) to lead off with a song — with "Auld Lang 
Syne." if that could be — and Pierie responding, the melody 
struggled from lip to lip, and finally broke out into a choral 
power that even elicited Whitman's contribution. Then Whit- 
man sat down in his chair again, gave quiet response to the hur- 
ried special congratulations of familiars and others who crowded 
about him, and was slowly wheeled out of his narrow quarters. 



"RECORDERS AGES HENCE." 15 

His basketed flowers, put in his lap and so taken home, for days 
after kept place and odor on the stove in his little parlor. One 
hand and another, one solicitous face and another, was bent upon 
him with its eager comradeship. But the chair was kept on its 
way, parting the crowd gently, and in the end reaching the door 
and passing out into the lobby. Not so proclaimed, this was still 
the dropping of the curtain. Again the policemen did their 
special and cherished service. Will it be a reminiscence for the 
ears of children's children? Soon was Whitman gone into the 
night. All attempts to reorganize the meeting were fruitless. 
Within five minutes following Whitman's departure the great 
mass of people had left the hall, and efforts to read letters and 
telegrams were therefore mainly fruitless. Whitman gone, the 
meeting had gone w T ith him, as though a more than Hamelinic 
pipe had been played. No one lingered but the assiduous re- 
porters, who, though the first to come, were the last to leave. 

I was asked the other day, Is it left for you to sum up the 
event ? But what need to sum up that which, rather than being 
fragmentary, was at once a direct and entire story? Camden, 
honoring Walt Whitman, was more than Camden ; for through 
Camden the world had voice, and that world not the world of 
a more or less petty and undiscriminating to-day, but the world 
that our poet in his noblest moods has invoked. Camden had 
risen to its spiritual gifts. Breaking away from concrete tyran- 
nies, Camden in this act bore testimony that Walt Whitman, 
prophesying a grander America, and wearied and worried by no 
scholastic chastisement, was to be rendered just tribute at last. 
Extravagant as it may seem to say so, this banquet would not 
have had half the significance, given strictly by authors, or made 
exclusively literary. Fortunately, it was not what would be 
called a literary occasion. Rescued from a restricted, it was 
rendered to the greater America. What one town, in the sense 
that includes all classes, may do to-day, a developed America 
and a freed Europe will ultimately compound in sharing on their 
vaster areas. But whatever the extent of recognition, the type 
of recognition will remain what it was this day to this simple 



1 6 "RECORDERS AGES HENCE:' 

and single constituency. Except for the absence of women and 
of the distinctively mechanical classes, the unconstraint and 
felicity of the event was from beginning to end as generous as 
the spirit of the man it was aimed to celebrate. 

O'Connor said of Walt Whitman in 1866: " To the hour of 
judgment, to the hour of sanity — let me resign him." However 
near or remote the arrival of that inevitable sunrise, this record 
may be taken with reference to it as a substantial contribution. 
Where thirty years ago men scorned to seriously discuss Walt 
Whitman, a representative paper sends to-day one of its best 
men (by interesting accident set right next me at the banquet) 
"to report the spirit of the occasion." "Thou must be a fool 
and a churl for a long season," says Emerson, addressing the 
ideal poet; Darwin once wrote, in the earlier years of his 
knotty labors, "And though I shall get more kicks than half- 
pennies, I will, life serving, attempt my work." Life has 
served Walt Whitman, to whom it is as natural to live heroically 
as to live at all, to a harvest of his own generous sowing. Criti- 
cism has entered upon the stage of kindliness. One more step — 
the step of unconventional examination — and the deed is done. 
Camden's demonstration has helped to clear the air. After this 
certain of the old protests must forever stand convicted. Re- 
porters, editors, writers, men of the law and of affairs, giving 
forth here an utterance of faith, have passed the word far on- 
ward. The attitude of the press was liberal and affectionate 
from the first. The unanimity of its good feeling was so marked 
that some confessed a disappointment, contending that a feast 
without spice had lost an essential factor. But however Walt 
Whitman, as he declared, may have felt smothered in the sugar 
and honey of attention, to his best friends it is clear enough 
that this event, multiplied a thousand times, will be needed be- 
fore the balance of justice in the world's treatment of him has 
been secured. 

And now, sacredly to be ventured, among pulsing and imper- 
ative last utterances, taking shape of an intense experience, how 
can I send this little memorial trusted to my hands off on its 



"RECORDERS AGES HENCE." j>j 

career without a word my own, sharing the privilege of the feast? 
For though silent before the common temptations to speech, at 
this moment, in this circle, body and spirit prevailed upon and 
absorbed, I have stood and watched, counting confidently in this 
victory my own victory and America's as well, and recalling with 
grateful thought my gracious opportunities through which per- 
sonally to know the man on whom so great a charge had been 
laid. Standing by Walt Whitman's side through all the battle 
of the past year, braving his dangers, sharing his defeats and 
rescues, glorying in the love that allied me in ever more willing 
service, watching the coming and going of friends, sensitive to 
the fine growth of popular reverence — who could have known 
better than I knew, looking in his face that memorable night, 
how potent the chosen instruments of his love, his more than 
armored courage and justice, had proved in the end? I dare 
not withdraw from the group, nor stay and say nothing. But 
staying, and given voice, let me vein my thought, though it were 
brought into a sentence, with flow of heart's blood. Let us all, 
I should say, cherish the fact that this was a non-literary inci- 
dent, as Walt Whitman is a non-literary man and his books are 
non-literary books ; that as Walt Whitman's future is in the 
hands, not of an anti-literary, but of a more than literary America, 
so it rang well in the tone of all this day said and done that it 
struck out of our largest and most varied life. It has seemed to 
me that this is what Walt Whitman himself must most have de- 
sired. Faith such as his guarantees universal means and universal 
ends. He realized early that the world misunderstood only that 
it might eventually understand. He has known well enough 
that the man who has the truth has no enemies — that whatever 
traduction appears self-appoints its doom. He has been serene 
in physical trials and just as serene in spiritual battle ; he knows 
that if he is a sun, he must have the sun's patience — that if he is 
not, impatience will neither hasten nor defer obscuration ; he 
has steadfastly turned his back on every effort of friend or critic 
to bring him to endorse half universes ; he has rung the alarum 
for behoof of humanism in literature — the only Veal conservator; 
he has shown that America can persevere in but one course, and 

2 



1 8 "RECORDERS AGES HEXCE." 

that course the course of the stars and tides, redolent of entire 
health ^nd of untrammeled manhood; he has protested against 
obscene delicacy, and has given to the word sacredness a large 
meaning impossible to even the best of past scriptures. Oh ! 
what a current of deep meanings seizes the first thought of enu- 
meration ! I dare not proceed. But to stand near as I have stood 
near ; to know in his deeds and on his lips a never-swerving con- 
firmative testimony; to realize the harmony of his past and his 
present; to catch and stay out of the hurrying life of our time 
the eloquent records of a consecrated day — not fleeting and 
ephemeral flatteries, but throbbing and capacious evidences drawn 
from the very heart of revelation and devotion — is to stand in 
the presence of that supreme, that last, that consoling circum- 
stance of worlds, which the story of every discoverer and his final 
glad audience unfolds. 

H. L. T. 

Camden, N. J., July 4, 1889. 



ADDRESSES 



Samuel H. Grey, 21 

Thomas B. Harned, 22 

Herbert Harlakenden Gilchrist, 25 

Francis Howard Williams, 27 

John Herbert Clifford, 29 

Charles G. Garrison, 34 

E. A. Armstrong, 36 

Richard Watson Gilder, 37 

Julian Hawthorne, 39 

Hamlin Garland, 40 

Henry L. Bonsall, 42 

Lincoln L. Eyre, 45 

(19) 



INVOCATION: J. Leonard Corning. 



Thanks to the Father of all for the light and inspiratio7i of 
genius and virtue ! Thanks for great and mighty souls, the 
gifts of Heaven to all the ages of time ! All praise to the 
Father for guiding words of truth and the sweet bonds of 
friendship and affection I Thanks for this hour of gratu- 
lation, calling its greetings from home and distant lands / 
Let the Father* s benediction be upon our honored and be- 
loved guest and upon all our hearts and households I 
Amen. 

(20) 



ADDRESSES. 



SAMUEL H. GREY: Camden. 

WELCOME. 

Gentlemen :— I have been selected by the committee of the 
citizens of Camden who have had the matter in charge to act as 
president upon this occasion, and upon me, as president, has 
devolved the agreeable duty of expressing in your behalf toward 
the guest of the evening, whom we are here to entertain and who 
by his presence bestows upon us as high an honor as we could 
ever receive, a cordial welcome. We, as citizens of Camden, 
the workman from his shop, the merchant from his counting- 
room, the lawyer from his office, even the preacher from his pul- 
pit — nay, more, the judge from his court — all sorts and condi- 
tions of men — come here together as fellow-citizens of this town 
this evening to welcome the most distinguished citizen not only 
of this town, but of this State. Distinguished, not as a soldier ; 
not as a merchant ; not as an accumulator of wealth ; not as an 
orator whose silver tongue a senate sways ; not as a preacher, 
who admonishes when we do wrong and sometimes sets us an 
example to do right ; but as a man among men whose heart 
beats in unison with the great heart of humanity. Generous, 
brave, disinterested, honest, sincere — all manly qualities are here 
impersonated in our guest. Patriotic, in his younger manhood 
he made sacrifices for his country from the effects of which he 
yet suffers. Honest, he has lived to a green old age, poor in 
purse but rich in every quality and in every endowment which 
makes manhood excellent. As a poet, his rugged verse rises 
above the dead level of ordinary literature as a majestic moun- 
tain rises above a plain. This man with these qualities — social, 
personal, intellectual — we are here this evening to greet. He is 
here by his presence to bestow upon us an honor. It gives me 
pleasure, gentlemen, speaking for you and in your behalf, to ex- 
tend to our townsman a cordial welcome, which words better 

(21) 



22 ADDRESSES. 

than mine could frame or phrase. I greet him as the honored 
guest of his fellow-citizens on this his seventieth birthday. 



WALT WHITMAN 

responded briefly : See page 5. 

THOMAS B. HARNED: Camden. 

OUR FELLOW-CITIZEN. 

In the year 1873 Walt Whitman came to the city of Camden 
"old, poor and paralyzed." He had no thought then that his 
life would be continued to its present stage. His best years had 
been devoted to the sacred duty of nursing the sick and wounded 
soldiers in the army hospitals at Washington. No tongue can 
tell the extent of that ministry. With untiring devotion, vigil- 
ance and fidelity, without fee or reward, he served his country 
in the hour of her greatest need. The history of the secession 
war presents no instance of nobler fulfilment of duty or sub- 
limer sacrifice. But the stalwart and majestic physique had to 
succumb to the terrible strain. The man whom we here honor 
came among us to spend his last days with those who were near 
and dear to him. His physical and spiritual condition at this 
time is best pictured in his own language : 

" My terminus near, 
The clouds already closing in upon me, 
The voyage balk'd, the course disputed, lost, 
I yield my ships to Thee. 

" My hands, my limbs grow nerveless, 
My brain feels rack'd, bewilder'd, 
Let the old timbers part, I will not part, 

I will cling fast to Thee, O God, though the waves buffet me, 
Thee, Thee at least I know." 

But the old timbers did not part. The old ship had been 
built too strongly. Rest and the ministrations of loving friends 
prolonged his life, and for more than fifteen years he has been 
our most distinguished citizen. 

It is not my purpose to speak on this occasion of Walt Whit- 
man's books or of his place in literature. On that field he has 
baffled all classification. While every epithet of rancor and op- 
probrium has been heaped upon his published writings, no man 
ever had truer friends. The controversy which he has uncon- 



HARNED, 23 

sciously provoked in the literary world is probably without a 
parallel. Only now are we beginning to realize the importance 
of his life-work and the grandeur of the man. 

The person Walt Whitman is greater than his book, or any 
book. He is made of that heroic stuff which creates such books. 
He himself is the great Epic of the senses, the passions, the at- 
tributes of the body and soul. Dear as he is to America and 
her democracy, he yet belongs to the whole world. He declares 
the perfection of the earth — its fruitful soil, its navigable seas, 
its majestic mountains, its forests, all created things. His love 
for the aggregate race is intense and boundless. His sense of 
the universal is sublime. He is the greatest living optimist. 
He is the incarnation of naturalism. He knows neither conven- 
tion nor hypocrisy. His cheerfulness is like a perpetual ray of 
sunshine. His kind and generous heart beats responsive to life 
wherever found. 

This is the kind of man we have had among us for many 
years. How we like to speak of his gentleness, his charity, his 
wisdom, his simplicity ! — of his majestic figure, cast in an an- 
tique mould, his ruddy countenance, his inspiring voice, his 
strong and classic face ! We have seen him on our streets, or 
frequenting the ferry-boats, or driving over the neighboring 
roads. His companions have been from every walk of life — 
more especially from among the poor and the plain. He has 
taken a personal interest in the welfare of mechanics, deck- 
hands, car-drivers. No class has escaped his attention, his af- 
fection : roughs, the criminal, the neglected, the forgotten, have 
been equally included. In nothing does he show his simplicity 
as in his love for children. They all know him. There is that 
about him which draws and holds them. And yet he is visited 
by persons of prominence from all parts of the world. This 
city to-day is known to thousands of persons in distant lands 
merely because it is the home of Walt Whitman. Emerson says 
that " the knowledge that in the city is a man who invented the 
railroad raises the credit of all the citizens." It has so proved 
with us. Our citizenship is raised because in our city lives the 
author of "Leaves of Grass." 

I deem it a great privilege to pay Walt Whitman the tribute 
of my respect. It has been my^good fortune to be counted 
among his personal friends, and I desire to emphasize with great 
clearness my conviction that every nfoment of his life tallies with 
the teachings proclaimed throughout his books. He is eminently 
consistent. He does not bend the knee to wealth or power. 
To him the ragged urchin is as dear as the learned scholar. We 
who know him best know that he assumes nothing. In him 



24 



ADDRESSES. 



nature has ample play. He has taken the rough with the smooth, 
and in his sorest trials has not been heard to utter a complaint. 
I do not believe there ever lived a man less restricted by his en- 
vironment. He cares neither for praise nor censure, ever jour- 
neying " the even tenor of his way." Let the day bring forth 
health or sickness, pleasure or pain, gain or loss — with a peace 
that passes all understanding he says : "It is all right, anyhow." 
They who have listened to the magic of his magnetic voice and 
have shared his simple prophetic conversation, which is "a uni- 
versity in itself," know how careful he is not to speak ill of any 
one. He never indulges in carping criticism. His wit is 
'■'gentle and bright" and "never carries a heartstain on its 
blade." Frugal in his habits, he has always expended upon 
himself the smallest amount possible, in order that he might aid 
others whom he deemed more needy. His charity is divine. 

But I cannot enter into any detailed analysis of Walt Whit- 
man's character. It is a familiar story to many here. For the 
last year we have heard and known how his life has hung in the 
balance. Little did we suppose that he could withstand his 
latest sickness and be with us to-day. How can I hope to utter 
what so fills our hearts as we come together here? We all say 
we have known him. Have any of us known him? Does not 
such a life baffle our understanding? 

We have assembled on this spot to-day to honor him — to look 
upon his radiant, serene face, and to thank him for the lesson 
he has taught us and will continue to teach to coming races. 

His life-work is finished. He awaits the eiid with com- 
placency. The consecration is complete. We crown him poet, 
prophet, philosopher, the incarnation of modern humanity. 

Camden will be best known and honored because it has known 
and honored Walt Whitman. Succeeding generations will do 
him reverence, and the little frame-house on Mickle street will 
be a shrine toward which pilgrims will travel in their adoration 
of him as one of the world's immortals. 

"Genius," says Macaulay, "is like the peak of Teneriffe, 
which catches the beams of the morning sun an hour before the 
rest of the world." 

From that high eminence, as the end draws near, with a faith 
in immortality which is abiding and sublime, Walt Whitman 
beholds the vision of the future — 

"As if some miracle, some hand divine unseal'd my eyes, 
Shadowy vast shapes smile through the air and sky, 
And on the distant waves sail countless ships, 
And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me." 



GILCHRIST. 



25 



HERBERT HARLAKENDEN GILCHRIST: 

Hampstead, London, England. 

FRIENDS ACROSS THE SEAS. 

How can my arms lift the pennant that floats proudly over the 
British Empire, and unfurl its heavy folds in the wild summer 
evening of this inimitable occasion ? 

How can the inarticulate voice of an artist salute the poet — 
strike the note — utter the message of respect and love from the 
toiling masses, the philosophers and scholars, of democratic and 
intellectual Great Britain ? 

I ask you gently to hear, kindly to judge my speech. "Piece 
out my imperfections with your thoughts," think when I talk of 
England's men and women that you see them. " For 'tis your 
thoughts that now must deck our" poet. 

It is true that I was born and have lived amongst the coura- 
geous handful of undaunted men and women who first greeted 
Walt Whitman and the publication of "Leaves of Grass " with 
a ringing cheer of welcome — a handful that has grown into hun- 
dreds, thousands — and which is still spreading under the influ- 
ence of that heavenly force. 

The great master's voice has moved to distant continents. 
"O waters, I have finger'd every shore with you." "That 
melody of life with its cunning tones " has swept across the At- 
lantic, entered the thatched cottage and ivy-grown moat- en- 
circled grange — invaded the universities, and within the girdle 
of those antique and moss-grown walls of Oxford and Cambridge 
the don and the under-graduate have been stirred by the poems 
which glow with life. 

The immortal reverberations floated east, south, west and 
north, till the waves struck the thoughts of workmen — toilers at 
Sheffield, Newcastle and Glasgow, including all of Scotland and 
Ireland. Our guest can picture in his mind's eye the sagacious, 
good-natured glance which shines upon him to-day from beneath 
soot-begrimed brows and smirched faces of brawny colliers, 
powerful smiths and mechanics. 

Walt Whitman, whose pieces have strengthened and sweetened 
the lives of the people, has moved the aristocrat, whose soul has 
expanded under the influence of the poet's great heart. Thought 
cannot be walled out by caste or the mask of materials, and the 
sweeping voice of the bard has taken captive ear and heart some 



26 ADDRESSES. 

of the true men and women throughout the length and breadth 
of the united kingdom. 

Noble women of Great Britain have shown, by pen and speech, 
to our warped and blunted masculine natures, the spiritual mean- 
ing and religious fervor which shine through and illuminate the 
leaves in " Leaves of Grass." 

The prosperity of this occasion forces upon my memory an 
expression that our guest made to myself during darker, less 
happy times; he said — "no magic incident of hairsbreadth es- 
cape in the ' Fairy Queen ' surpassed the resuscitation of my- 
self from the perils of death by brave champions in 1876. That 
movement was the turning point of my fortunes. They had 
been gloomy, ebbing and waning for nearly ten years ; and the 
storing and filling my pockets to supply the personal needs and 
necessities of life — which had got to be at that time in the 
slough and very sink of perdition — this magic lift, as in the old 
legends, of warm support and cheering responses from the big 
fellows, from Alfred Tennyson, Lord Houghton, William 
Michael Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Robert Bu- 
chanan and Edward Carpenter, was accomplished by my British 
friends, who sprang into the breach and plucked me from the 
perils and jaws of death, as Harry Hotspur would 

. . . " ' dive into the bottom of the deep, 
Where falhom-line could never touch the ground, 
And pluck up drowned honour by the locks.' " 

li Consideration like an angel came " in time ; and this philoso- 
pher who has given the world so much, has, king-like, shown us 
how a man should take the world's stray offerings. The proud 
poet triumphantly emerges from beneath the base-black cloud of 
contumely and neglect — the insolence of office and the spurns 
that patient merit of the unworthy takes — passes through this 
ugly rack and shows us by his pride of port his sail of greatness. 

Your Washington, Jefferson and Monroe have given you em- 
phatic warnings against "entangling alliances" with any Eu- 
ropean people or any foreign people. But there is a power and 
faculty in the race — adhesiveness is the phrenological term — 
magnetic friendship and good-will of the common humanity of 
all nations — that they would certainly have encouraged, and 
which all good publicists would ever encourage. 

Of this faculty "Leaves of Grass" is the book, and Walt 
Whitman is the poet, beyond any hitherto known : he scat! 
not only through all the States of this immense and variform 
Union, but ail the lands and races of the globe. America, to 



GILCHRIST— WILLIAMS. 



27 



him, stands really greater in that than in all its wealth, products 
and even intellect. By him, poetry is to be its main exemplar 
and teacher. 

Thus the succor which rescued your great one was not the 
work of individuals, no ! — nor should it be viewed as the friendly 
privilege and monopoly of the mother country — the fair action 
was rather a compliment to the pride of America from the 
British Isles as typifying the brotherliness of men, and in cementing 
a larger guild of literature than the world has hitherto known. 

Thirteen summers ago I first met our guest — to-day I find my- 
self standing within the sunshine of the poet's eye. 

In behalf of and for the faithful sons and daughters of the 
British Isles, and the friends across the seas, I wish Walt Whit- 
man, who sits honored and surrounded with troops of friends, 
many happy returns of the day. 



FRANCIS HOWARD WILLIAMS: 

Germantown. 

PAST AND PRESENT. 

The history of all truly great movements is a chronicle of long 
injustice and of final triumph. 

When Wordsworth raised the standard of revolt against the 
formalism of the school of Pope, he brought down upon his head 
the vials of English literary wrath, and not until he was an old 
man did he conquer a recognition and win the just reward of his 
heroism. 

For years and years Walt Whitman has, been the standard- 
bearer in a movement no less important than that against the 
English classical school. For years and years he has borne 
calumny and misrepresentation from a public which utterly failed 
to understand him, and from certain exclusive coteries which 
willfully failed to do so. 

People vilified him, and when he would not answer they 
searched the " Leaves of Grass " to find the ground of an accu- 
sation. 

They said that he was a sensualist, taking no thought of the 
spiritual essence and spiritual needs of humanity. But they 
found written in " Leaves of Grass : " 

" I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul" 

and that throughout the book the soul is celebrated equally with 



28 ADDRESSES. 

the body, the mind equally with the heart, the spirit equally with 
the sense. They found it an essential part of the poet's work to 
so celebrate them, just as he celebrates the female equally with 
the male in depicting the perfect personality of man. 

Then these people accused him of infidelity, although they 
read in his book that 

"A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels." 

Again they accused him of being a gross materialist, finding, 
doubtless, much beauty in external nature, but failing to recog- 
nize the power behind it all. He was a pantheist with vision 
blinded to the higher spiritual insight. But there, in the' sixth 
section of the Song of Myself, stood that surpassingly lovely 
passage : 

"A child said, What is the grass ? fetching it to me with full hands; 
How could I answer the child ? I do not know what it is any more 
than he. 

"I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. 

" Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, 
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, 

Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and 
remark, and say Whose?''' 1 

Literature contains no finer recognition of an "Eternal Power 
not ourselves which makes for righteousness," and let me say in- 
cidentally, no finer example of a delicate sense of verbal 
melody. 

And so it has gone on ; there has been a deal of howling and 
conventional shuddering — a deal of holding up the hands in 
shocked amazement — the dear people all the while forgetful of 
the fact that in reading Whitman they were looking into a clear 
mirror which showed them the reflection of themselves y and 
which didn't make them look prettier, simply because the mirror 
wasn't cracked. 

And amid all the vituperation the poet has calmly said : 

" I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood, 
I see that the elementary laws never apologize." 

To-day there are signs that the vindication has come, and in 
the right way — from without. It has come from those compelled 
thereto by the working out of inexorable truth. 

Speaking for Philadelphia, I am sure that whatever there is of 
a literary movement there tends more and more towards the ac- 



WILLIAMS— CLIFFORD. 



29 



ceptance of at least the fundamental principles and basic mean- 
ing of the " Leaves of Grass " — towards a recognition of the fact 
that all true things are beautiful to him who sees aright. 

You of Camden can claim Walt Whitman for your own, but 
you must let us of the bigger town across the river have a share 
in him because we are now beginning to deserve it. 

Such a gathering as this is a pleasant sign of the times. We 
feel that in striving to honor Walt Whitman we are doubly 
honoring ourselves, and we know with all the certainty of a 
fixed conviction that his fame will rest securely on that high 
plane achieved by his utterance of a great message. 



JOHN HERBERT CLIFFORD: Germantown. 

PROPHET AND BARD. 

Isaac Taylor, now thirty years dead, wrote: "Human nature 
utters itself with passion ; but yet it is not a false utterance ; it is 
a true though an impetuous vaticination." For vaticination we 
say, prophecy, but no more to tell the god's-will, nor the particu- 
lar future. The word points straight through all localisms to 
universal meanings. 

And prophet here and now means to us a voice of human 
nature, passionate and true ; and of the universal soul, not echo 
of tribal god for peculiar people. Oracles are dumb. Hebrew line, 
grand in its day, spokesmen all of positive faiths, grow faint 
when speaks the Universe by the mouth of its holy prophet. 

Great lispings there were, articulations worthy the man-child's 
dream of his coming stature. All must be gathered up into the 
vaster music of a race larger grown. 

We claim no single or pre-eminent voice. All the world is 
witness. But the greatening spiritual content brings its able 
utterers. 

Sit we not here with one of these? In the volume of the 
Book it is written, and in the volume of the faithful years: 
Leaves of Grass immortal with thought ; Leaves of Life as 
deathless in the days, Specimen Days of the living and the loving 
soul. Green be his Novei?iber Boughs I No Sands at Seventy 
can sterilize this soil. No carping unfastens the Collect of Com- 
rades and Brotherhood Bond of Man. 

Not much yet in "Familiar Quotations," Whitman is quoted, 
familiar in the plagiary's euphemism — " unconscious absorption." 
When gatherers shall come with bees' instinct for flowers, anthol- 
ogies will bloom with his name. 



30 ADDRESSES. ' 

No seven cities war to claim his birth, though seven hundred 
deny the bread of just fame. Happy that one city of title undis- 
puted ! 

For not much longer can his credentials be questioned. Do 
you hear some still asking: "Is he a poet?" Bring Charles 
Lamb's candle, and look at their heads ! Wide consent may be 
withheld, until his crown is on. And some recoil is claimed from 
early recognitions. The son of Emerson, in a little book about 
his father, plants a foot-note of disparagement, based upon al- 
leged confessions of the Concord sage, who found Leaves of 
Grass " the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that 
America has yet contributed," and greeted its author "at the 
beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long 
foreground somewhere for such a start." This, it would seem, 
Emerson inclined to take oack, disappointed of his expectations. 
But what he had written he had written. Retraction were self-re- 
coil, no more. For Emerson no word but reverence here. Yet, 
alas ! for prophet's faithfulness to prophet ! Whitman too 
coarse for the expounder of Montaigne and Shakspere and 
Goethe ! But the fatal sentence is that " this catalogue style of 
poetry is easy and leads nowhere." But are there not other 
catalogues in poetry? In the Iliad some of various outfits for 
limited operations, though they do lead somewhere. Is it the 
rub that Whitman's catalogues lead everywhere ? Perhaps it is 
at the catalogues that old Homer nods. If so, shall not other 
Homers nod — and their readers as well ? But does our poet 
look a nodder ? Gaze not at him here, but in that Morse head 
of him see if there be not rather the countenance of an elder 
god, with eyes that look straight on and never wink.* 

Transcender of Transcendentalists ! German, English, New 
England Transcendentalism ? Deportations of a spirit to high 
exile of the chosen "cult," sending back, too radiant for com- 
mon eyes, celestial visions. 

Archbishop Whately religiously placed Emerson in the 
" magic-lanthorn school" of writers, their object, as they them- 
selves might confess, " merely to elevate and surprise." Blind 
enough, yet dimly hinting want of a completing practical power 
in Ideal Philosophy to seize and hold man's actual life. In 
Emerson that power appears, spite of infinite refinements, yet 
needing mediators for the multitude. But Whitman should be 
his own mediator, even to runners who read. Those very cat- 
alogues are hooks that fasten him to life. Altogether trans- 
cendental, he is not less immediate to men. Thoughts to lift 

* See frontispiece. 



CLIFFORD. 



3* 



them, sympathy to comfort, brother-love to cheer — he gives all 
these. 

Samuel Johnson, of Salem, whose Transcendentalism held all 
science and practical ethics, drew Theodore Parker — Transcen- 
dentalism's great warrior-saint — with " the wise head of Socrates 
and the warm, loving heart of Robert Burns." Lend this like- 
ness to our poet ; is it not as fit ? His philosophy comes down 
from the heaven of select souls to grasp the hand of Man the 
Democrat. His dreams refresh men from their toil. They turn 
drudgery to song. Serenest, sanest optimism, that reckons with 
ugliness and ills ! What believing of men already here, what 
heralding of better men to come ! Complete American, pic- 
tured in the Book ; prefigured, as in Lincoln's character, chanted 
in his requiem, with grandeur and tenderness sung ; and in the 
American soldier, fortunate to die and be in proud remembrance 
here. And not alone the finished American : he sings the Per- 
fect Man ; knows him " the adding up of works." 

Is not here some first shaping of the Epic of Humanity, 
hitherto writ but in fragments of time and place, broken tales 
" of love and woe," one day to be written full, written as lived 
by man ? Dante and Danton, the Sayer and the Doer, Heaven 
and Hell and Earth, the Past, the Present, the Future, Revolu- 
tion, Evolution — all shall be in its mighty sweep. 

The poet who takes Idealism down into the doing of that greatest 
reverence of Goethe's — of Jesus', too, and Paul's, and Fourier's, 
and John Brown's — reverence for the lives below, is needed to carry 
man out to the Universe and up to God. For he does not fear 
to say, God. Voltaire said that if God did not exist, man must 
invent him. And some who say not God do say almost as good, 
say what is better than any invented god. Our poet teaches 
what Thoreau prayed : " May I love and revere myself above all 
the gods that man has ever invented." Old concern to take 
care of God goes with modern prompting to care for man. 
Take care of man, and God will take care of himself — and of 
men's substitutes for him. Whitman's God is cosmic. The 
daring poet who sings himself 'a cosmos has not far to seek his 
God, nor lacks for equal mind to celebrate the gifts of life and 
death. 

Fulfiller for his part is he of the poetic past and continuator 
to the future of 

" Olympian bards who sung 
Divine ideas below, 
Which always find us young, 
And always keep us so." 



3 2 



ADDBESSES. 



I heard that one of Whitman's contemporaries, himself a grave 
writer, and sometimes morose, found our poet too serious. I 
knew a young fellow of wild genius who one day waylaid Car- 
lyle in his walk and soon had him dismissing philosophers each 
to his own place. Hegel he doomed for heaviness. But my 
youth replied : " You could hardly expect Atlas, with the world 
on his shoulders, to dance a jig." 

And our Atlas-poet, with cosmos in his brain, must needs 
leave sportive moods to humorists ! Yet are not all humors 
there, veining his world with " infinite variety " ? 

''After reading Hegel " Whitman wrote: 

" Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily 
hastening towards immortality, 
And the vast all that is called Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and be- 
come lost and dead." 

Yes, serious that, and high. So is he in all, above sus- 
picion of obscene or impure ; and they who tax him with such 
offense bring their defilement with them. He has, no doubt, 
the faults of his own qualities ; he cannot be smirched with 
theirs. 

So serious and great I deem it no extravagance to think our 
prophet-bard, that Carlyle's praise of the Book of Job might 
well be given to his : 

" One of the grandest things ever written with a pen. . . . 
Such a noble universality, different from noble patriotism 
or sectarianism, reigns in it. . . . All men's Book ! . . . 
Grand in its sincerity, its simplicity, in its epic melody and 
repose of reconcilement. . . . True insight and vision for all 
things, material things no less than spiritual. . . . Sublime 
sorrow, sublime reconciliation, oldest choral melody, soft as the 
heart of mankind, so soft and great, as the summer midnight, as 
the world with its seas and stars. ' ' 

No singer of times and clans, of courts and games, and loves 
and wars of places, he is Prophet of Universal Life and Bard of 
the Cosmic Epos. He gives new words to the dictionary, new 
darings and achievement to literature. Single-handed hero in 
the peaceful war, how calmly he abides the issue, repelling blows 
with benedictions and treacheries with child-like trust. Homer 
perhaps is many; and Shakspere — who knows? But here in- 
dubitably is one. And, like Wisdom of old, remaining in him- 
self, he maketh all things new. What frets and jars in the world 
of letters are soothed to calm in the all-accepting bosom of his 
cheerful faith ! No come-outer, jealous of other come-outers, 



CLIFFORD. 33 

lest they be frjghtfuller than himself; not one of Hawthorne's 
come-outers, eating no solid food, but living on the scent of 
other people's cookery ; not come-outer at all, because never 
gone in. What are little systems to the Seer of All ? 

We love Emerson, "an iconoclast without a hammer." We 
love also the right iconoclast with his hammer, the very 
hammer of Thor, for idol-mountains which its smiting alone 
can bring down. Every prophet and reformer is his own 
species, like the schoolmen's angel. But was ever hammer as 
heavy, with blows as strong as Whitman's, so noiselessly swung, 
like God's greatest weights upon their smallest wires ? Luther, 
Cromwell, Parker, Garrison and sturdy smiters still bringing 
down the strongholds of superstition and wrong — how their 
mighty strokes resound ! But see this valiant striker break the 
prison walls of Custom and Error, all silently opening man's 
soul to the day ! 

Some five and forty years ago Elizabeth Barrett wrote to a New 
England friend: "We have one Shakspere between us — your 
land and ours — and one Milton. And now we are waiting for 
you to give us another." But why another Shakspere or Mil- 
ton ? One of a kind will do. We indeed give you anothei 
poet, but he is his own kind — sui generis — not for one land, nor 
two, but for all the lands and times. 

Lesser bards have waited their centuries to be known. And 
he can wait — if the centuries can wait for him. 

" Cast forth thy word into the ever-living, ever-working uni- 
verse ; it is a seed-grain that cannot die ; unnoticed to-day, it 
will be found flourishing afte. a thousand years." 

This of another seer is likewise our poet's faith. Well has he 
kept it, and nobly leaves it to mankind. 



" All, all for immortality, 
Love like the light silently wrapping all, 
Nature's amelioration blessing all, 

The blossoms, fruits of ages, orchards divine and certain, 
Forms, objects, growths, humanities, to spiritual images ripening. 



" Give me O God to sing that thought, 
Give me, give him or her I love this quenchless faith, 
In Thy ensemble, whatever else withheld, withhold not from us, 
Belief in plan of Thee enclosed in Time and Space, 
Health, peace, salvation universal." 

2 



34 ADDBE8SE& 

CHARLES G. GARRISON: Camden. 

LAW— NATURAL AXD CGXVEXTIOXAL. 

Into the structure of the temple of immortality two widely 
different forms of genius enter. There is the genius of the 
architect, which embodies material elements so as to express in 
lasting form a single individuality — a kind of genius which 
lacks growth and is without vitality. Then there are the 
material elements themselves, materials brought to the temple, 
but not made of man, having their origin in natural laws, grow- 
ing stratum upon stratum, like all growths. Between these two 
types there is an essential distinction. The genius of the archi- 
tect is fixed, cribbed and confined, while the material elements 
of which the building is framed are capable of other and indefi- 
nite uses. This latter is the type of mind of which all i; world- 
books" are formed. Among the classic dramatists Euripides 
and Sophocles furnished such types ; Homer and Virgil among 
the epic poets ; in philosophy, Plato ; in poetry, the Hebrew 
scriptures : in later times, Goethe. It is of this type of mind 
that Carlyle speaks when he exclaims of Shakspere ; 

" Oh, this myriad-minded mar. ! 

But, Mr. President, it is rare, within the lifetime of the furnisher 
of such material to the world, th«» c those about discover in him 
this immortal quality. To our guest this rare distinction must 
be accorded, that his contemporaries see in him the myriad- 
mindedness of genius. 

If. however, there be one thing which would be denied to him, 
even by those who speak sincerely and lovingly, it would be 
the possession of any correct notion of Laze. If I mistake not, 
he has been spoken of as " Walt, the lawless." 

Law includes such diverse ideas. We have the idea of a 
legislative enactment. That is one notion of Law. Then there 
are " social laws," as we call them, which undertake to regulate 
all our private affairs for us, even our morals. And then there 
is another idea of Law which lies deeper than these, viz. : that 
immutable condition of things to which — whether we recognize 
it or not, whether we will or not — all things that are true must 
conform, and of which, strange to say, the least possible account 
is taken in dealing with the other two. Thus it happens that 
there has always been a conflict between the two concrete notions 



GARRISON. 



35 



of Law and this one great and true idea. The history of every 
philosophy, of every race, of every religion, is nothing more, or 
but little more, than the history of the warfare between these 
two notions of the Law, the onward spirit of humanity always 
deciding for the true ideal. Hastily suggested, is the attitude 
of Socrates in such a warfare, who still lives as the vital instinct 
of the philosophy of Plato ; of Gautama, to-day the great 
Buddha of three hundred millions of his fellow-men; of a cer- 
tain young rabbi on the shores of Galilee, whose spirit has 
entered into all modern civilization. All these are exemplars 
of this warfare in which the true and fundamental law opposed, 
for the time being, the other lesser laws. What is chiefly to be 
noticed in all great spiritual movements is that while they 
fought against laws they fought toward Law. 

Humbly, then, should we reproach any great mind with the 
idea of its lawlessness. It is the special province of genius to 
see where the true law lies. Rightly understood the spirit of 
genius is never lawless. Rather would it befit us, in view of the 
transcendent vision of genius, to question humbly our own 
faculties, or seek for what may aid our sight toward the distant 
worlds he sees, before we deem in our hearts that he is gazing 
into vacant air. 

But our poet has nothing to say about these warfares of ideas 
in the great philosophic or religious systems. His words are not 
addressed to nations ; not to senates ; not to the municipal 
divisions into which people divide themselves. He speaks but 
to man, of whom philosophers have always delighted to speak as 
a little world — a "Microcosm," they call him. And what is 
the word that Whitman brings to him ? What does he say to 
him when man knows not by. which of the arbitrary laws about 
him he ought to guide his life ? I refer not to legislative or 
civil laws. I mean those forces which are brought to bear on 
the life of man, socially, ethically. Books, creeds and next 
door neighbors tell him to do this or to do that, or he shall be 
condemned. In crises of his life he finds these rules fall away 
from him, or he outgrows them ; he knows not how to test them. 
When weighed in the balance they are found wanting in 
spiritual truth. Then comes the spirit which pervades every 
line of Whitman and bids each man cherish himself as the 
temple of truth, and he will know where to find it. 

Whitman teaches, above all else, that man has within himself 
that element of the divine which is capable of placing him in 
unison with nature and beauty, and at one with his fellow-men. 
In the language of St. Paul, he bids men remember that they are 
**. sons of God " in the sense that they have within them the god- 



36 



ADDRESSES, 



like spirit which alone is capable of indefinite growth and expan- 
sion. "Nothing from without, everything from within," is his 
motto. 

All the criticism that can be heaped upon Whitman for deify- 
ing the temple of the body is explained by the idea that it is to 
him the tabernacle of that spirit of truth which he would have 
all whom he loves so dearly look upon as a divine heritage, that 
they may make the spirit and the temple which encloses it worthy 
each of the other. 

The teaching of Whitman is embodied in the words of that 
other myriad-minded poet who says, 

" To thine own self be true, 
And it must follow as the night the day, 
Thou canst not then be false to any man." 



E. A. ARMSTRONG: Camden. 

STATE OF NEW JERSEY. 

It seems to me that New Jersey is the State 

in which Walt Whitman ought to live. How many are the jibes, 
and the sneers, and the slurs that New Jersey has received by 
would-be wits and philosophers ! Serenely she has taken them 
all, conscious that one day justification would come and that 
appreciation would follow. That day has arrived. Walt Whit- 
man has never complained because he has been unjustly con- 
demned. Walt Whitman has never said an unkind word in 
answer to all the unfair, and unjust, and unrighteous criticisms 
that were hurled at him. New Jersey, therefore, is proud of 
Walt Whitman ; and although it was not his fortune to be born 
withki her borders, we know that Walt Whitman is proud of 
New Jersey. "A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind," and 
we who are native-born Jerseymen, we who love our soil, and 
love our State, and love all our surroundings, sir, have learned 
in the years in which you have lived with us to love you ; and 
we, your fellow-citizens, and your fellow-State inhabitants, 
greet you here to-day, and say to you, "May the years that 
have passed bring you in many years yet to come rich fruits and 
rich returns." .... I am glad to extend to Walt Whitman, 
on behalf of all the people of New Jersey, the warmest con- 
gratulations upon the completion of the seventieth year of his 
life, and I know that every loyal Jersey heart will join with me 



ARMSTR ONG— GILDER. 3 7 

in wishing a continuance by many years of that life, with its illus- 
tration and example of true manhood, true fellowship, true 
democracy, and its evidence of human love, and all will join 
with me in a hearty "amen " when I say, " May those years be 
long measured out to the people of the country/' 



RICHARD WATSON GILDER: New York. 

LITER A TURE. 

I have heard the murmured protests of my friend as praise has 
been added to praise, but I don't know what we are going to do 
unless we praise Walt Whitman to-night. There was a little 
hint communicated that possibly it might be agreeable to you 
and to our guest that I should say something about American litera- 
ture, but you will be happy to know that I have positively refused. 
I do not think you are greatly interested in literature outside 
of Camden to-night, and I think that my best introduction would 
be to say that I was born not far from Camden, and I am here 
to welcome Walt Whitman as myself a born Jerseyman. He 
thought I was going to give you an encyclopedia of American 
literature, and he said to me that he did not want me to omit 
Cooper, Bryant, Emerson, and Whittier — so they are not omitted. 
In our thoughts to-night no great names in American literature 
are omitted, and bright among them shines the name of Wait 
Whitman. 

But, gentlemen, it is a satisfaction to be here, also, as a literary 
man, as a very busy though humble worker in literary fields. You 
have heard Mr. Whitman praised as a man, as a good man, as a 
patriot and all that, but you know perfectly well that you would 
have heard very little praise of Mr. Whitman if he had not been 
a literary man. He is a poet, thank God ! and you people of 
Camden and Philadelphia are honoring yourselves most highly 
in giving this unusual tribute, this neighborhood tribute, to the 
living poet. 

Our friend, Judge Garrison, has spoken to-night of two kinds 
of contributions to literature — the literature of substance, and 
the literature of form. I am a stickler for form in literature, and 
one thing that I admire in Walt Whitman is his magnificent form. 
It is one of the most remarkable things in all literature and one 
of the most individual. In its kind, and at its best, it is unap- 
proachable. No one can imitate with success Whitman's pecu- 
liar style ; those who have tried — men, women and boys — have 
all failed. No one can do it but Walt Whitman. At the same 



3 5 ADDRESSES. 

time the substance of Whitman's poetry pours freely into any 
language and carries its flood of meaning and of passion into 
whatever language it flows. 

I remember well the first great impression I ever had of 
W lkman's poetry. It was received in reading a review of it in 
a French magazine many years ago, not a great while after 
the war. I had seen a great deal of our war as a boy, as the son 
of a soldier living in camp with the army of the Potomac, and 
as a soldier myself for a short time. I had seen people shot, 
and I had seen a good deal of the hospitals during the late war ; 
and as a reporter for a Jersey paper up here in Newark, I had 
travelled with the funeral of Abraham Lincoln. The only time I 
ever saw Lincoln was his dead face in Independence Hall over 
across the river. It was near midnight — a policeman let me in 
after the crowd had passed through — and I climbed up those 
steps through the window and came down suddenly upon that 
still, immortal face. Then I walked alone up to the railroad 
station, which was in the northern end of the town. As I walked 
I heard the band coming up behind me, and then the body ar- 
rived, and we were all awake throughout the night, and we saw 
the faces of myriads turned with tears upon the funeral train — 
faces of men, women and children — all the way to Newark, 
where I got off and wrote my report. 

Yes, I saw a great deal of the war, but I have read nothing 
about the war that carries its volume of feeling, its enthusiasm, 
its pathos, its picturesqueness, as does the poetry of Walt Whit- 
man. As I say, my first impression of that was received from a 
review written in another language. Not long ago another 
Frenchman took up Whitman's war poetry again, and poured it 
out for his readers, and I got hold of it again, and again I was 
shaken like a reed in the wind. There is nothing like it. 
T lere is no description of war in verse like it, certainly not in 
our language. 

I was asked to be impromptu, to-night, but my impromptu 
een a great deal spoiled by the previous impromptus. I 
wanted t: say something very fresh and impressive on the line 
of our friend here, about Walt Whitman's appreciation of the 
duality of existence. Those who look through his poetry like 
Dr. Johnson's old worn naughty words, and who really 

know nothing about it, think that he is a poet only of one phase 
of life ; but where outside of the Bible is there a stronger sense 

r is there a stronger passion for imm 
a stronger vision of the individuality of the soul, the quench- 
less human soul ? It is because he covers both the flesh and 
the spirit, that Whitman reaches some of the loftiest minds 



GILDER— HA WTHORNE. 39 

of our day. He has not yet penetrated to the masses, but he will 
in years to come through the finer intellects of the time. They 
will interpret him because they feel most keenly his literary form ; 
they feel most keenly his subtleties, the beauties of his thought 
and of his language. 

Gentlemen, in New York we are building an arch to commemo- 
rate our Washington Centennial. There is a great deal of public 
spirit in that town of ours, and we are trying to concentrate it now 
upon a most beautiful and fitting memorial of the late Centen- 
nial celebration. One feature of the arch is that it is to be built 
not only by the rich but by the poor, by the children with their 
pennies and by the millionaires with their thousands. And in 
the corner-stone we are going to put the names of all those 
people. We shall probably put there other records of the time. 
We shall put there some description of the Centennial ; per- 
haps, the names of our President, Governor, Mayor, and — Com- 
mon Council ! We will put there a very beautiful medal by 
Saint Gaudens, which our committee had the honor to send 
forth. And some thousands of years from now, when civilization 
moves onward — northward, perhaps, around the Pole — some- 
body will come there and, under the ruins, will find a record of 
the New York of these times. 

Place Walt Whitman's poetry in the corner-stone of this na- 
tion, let some convulsion of Nature overthrow these United 
States, and then let that poetry be found ; and from the lines 
will rise up a picture of our times, such, I believe, as nowhere 
else can be found. 



JULIAN HAWTHORNE: Scotch Plains, N. J. 

DEPUTY OF NATURE. 

The short shift in the matter of notice given me for this call 
is offset by the belief that this is one of those rare occasions on 
which the frank giving-out of hearty feeling has as much a place 
as premeditated eloquence ; and the reason, as I need not tell 
you, is, that Walt Whitman sits here as the deputy of nature, 
her embassador accredited and approved. I have always 
thought of Walt Whitman less as an individual man than as 
i gospel. Praise of him is praise of humanity, and personal 
vanity is as alien from him as from Mt. Washington or the 
Mississippi. His books show us that no one better than he 
has loved his fellow-man, and yet we feel that the qualities in us 
which he finds most lovable are not the petty personal ones, but 
those which belong to the race. Take, for example^ his friend- 



40 ADDRESSES. 

ship for the greatest man of our generation, Abraham Lincoln. 
Great as was his personal love for Lincoln, I question if his 
highest affection and deepest reverence were not paid rather to 
the voice and hand of a destiny mightier than Lincoln's speak- 
ing and acting through him to national ends, and because he 
recognized in Lincoln the heart and brain of a people working 
and planning through him the union and freedom of their coun- 
try. It was for this and for no lesser reason that he was able 
to hail Lincoln as "My Captain." And then again, to show 
the breadth of the man, take at the other end of the scale his 
lines "To a Common Prostitute." He entered into no ques- 
tion of untoward circumstances, nor into any gradations of sin — 
original, hereditary or personal — but he saw her standing there 
as she has stood through history, the victim of man, and his 
Nemesis ; and as such he, as a man, accepted her. He saw 
that our universal mother Nature lavished upon her, as upon the 
most immaculate of her sisters, the warmth of the sun, the fresh- 
ness of the rain, the perfume of the flowers and the rustling of 
the leaves, and he said to her, 

" Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you." 

It was a great saying, and the world must sooner or later give 
heed to it ; and surely, the man and poet whose sympathy 
can extend from the highest specimen of our times to the lowest 
nameless outcast, is worthy of more than all the sympathy and 
honor that we contain. 



HAMLIN GARLAND: Jamaica Plain, Mass. 

THE TEACHER. 

It seems peculiarly fitting to me at this time- that a personal 
acknowledgment should be made of the debt that we owe to our 
great democratic poet. In making this for myself, I am perfectly 
sure that I am representative of a large and increasing group of 
men and women both here and abroad. 

Walt Whitman has taught me many great and searching truths, 
but in the press there are two lifts of thought and feeling 
which rise so high they catch the eternal sunshine. These are, 
Optimism and Altruism — Hope for the future and Sympathy 
toward men. If I am right in the belief that I am a representative 
recipient, then I am right in saying that if Whitman had done 
no more than teach these great emotions — and live them in his 



GARLAND. 4 1 

life, which is better — he would be worthy of all the honor we 
can give him. For Walt Whitman's optimism is not the blind 
optimism of ignorant youth, but the jubilant flight of the stern- 
eyed poet, vaulting like the eagle over darkness and storms. He 
sees and has seen the failures, abortions, vices and diseases of our 
social life, and yet his sublime optimism spreads wing over them all. 

He has the passion of hope. As his religion has no hell, so 
his philosophy knows no despair. No matcer how greed and 
avarice may shout and thunder along their granite grooves — no 
matter how thick the miasmatic mist of bribery may rise from 
our political cess-pools — his tumultuous and optimistic song rises 
above it all on level, jocund wing. 

He caught long ago the deepest principle of evolution, of 
progress, which is, that the infinite past portends and prefigures 
the infinite future; that each age is the child of the past and 
the parent of the future; that nothing happens, that everything 
is caused ; and that no age could conceivably have been other 
than it was. This enables him to sing : 

" What will be will be well, for what is is well. . . , . 
Pleasantly and well-suited I walk, 

Whither I walk I cannot define, but I know it is good, 
The whole universe indicates that it is good, 

The past and the present indicate that it is good 

And henceforth I will go celebrate anything I see or arn, 
And sing and laugh and deny nothing." 

This steadfast and superb faith in the universe the most 
exhaustive knowledge of evil has not shaken. Age, suffering, 
neglect, misprision, have not had power to prevail over it. 
This is one of the great lessons of our great poet-seer. 

The other great lesson which he has taught us is, the passion 
of sympathy — the great lesson which the ages have so slowly 
learned — the passion which a militant age trod under foot, but 
which in this new and peaceful era is to be the one consummate 
resplendent flower of a new and more glorious chivalry. 

Walt Whitman is an absolute democrat. He knows no line 
of color, race or class. There is no nature so dwarfed and 
darkened, that he has not sung of its need, saying, "This 
is a human soul and a brother ; which of you are ready to 
condemn it?" Impartial as the sun which shines, generous as 
the ocean, his sympathy embraces all. This passion during the 
civil war sent him, amid the horrible hospital scenes, to the 
' heroic duties which struck him down in his middle prime of life. 
Greater love hath no man than this: he laid down his life for 
strangers. He could not fight men, but he could fight disease 



4: ADDRESSER 

and face death with calm eyes. The value of this life and 
teaching is inconceivably great. 

We have subst . passed the age :t~ m litaris n a but we are 

engaged in an industrial war. St:::~e and heartless cruelty still 

survive, but in other forms. Brotherhood and peace are still 
far-off blessed dreams, and the need of great teachers of sym- 
pathy and hope is pressing indeed. Let as give thanks to the 
lay :hat added one more teacher of hope and sympathy. Let 
us take : irage of the fact that out of a day of dollars, out of a 
tin ::" selfish :rade, out of the surf-like roar of material pro- 
gress, such a singer, with snch a message, was born, and that 
he has gained at last the respectful ear of his age and time. 

I have purposely left oat of my tribute any reference to Walt 
:.-nan ? s poetry as poetry, because I knew that others would 
efficiently touch upon tha: phase of his work. I am satisfied, 
moreover, that the American people must first know him as a 
man — must kn : w : le great patient heart and life of Walt Whit- 
man — before they will on ierstand his stupendous books. It is 
our duty, we who know him, to tell his countrymen of his - - 
piicit grandeur and blamelessness : f life, thus hastening the 
time when he will be known for what he is — the strongest, most 
electric, most original of modern poe:;. 

In conclusion, let me say how much pleasure it gives me to 
take part in such a gathering as this. Praise too often builds 
monuments when it should build houses — raises tombs when it 
should have warmed hearts. Too often we neglect the living 
man and honor the dead poet. Praise for the hearing ear, I say 
— flowers of love for the throbbing sense — of the living mar. I 
present my wreath of praise — drop my bit of laurel into the - 
warm, firm hand of the singer. Wall itman, victorious at 

seventy ! 

HEXRY L. BONSALL: Camden. 

"A CHILD OF ADAM"— R - ' and Improved 

After eme Justice has capture ur Garrison and in- 

I the art of the Centur in the weaving of a 

land of Hawthorne blossoms to bedeck the brow of our 

- — :'\ the bench, the bar, the publicist, poet and preacher 

- each and all so unreservedly given testimony to the faith 
in them — when the gra - rs have made their presentment 

— what remains for one of the petit panel save to give in a plain, 
unvarnished manner some of the simpler impressions drawn, not 

opinion in this symposium, but gleaned 



BONSALL. 



43 



in contact with the person, and in something more than a cursory 
contemplation of his work? 

Walt Whitman has ever been to me a large and luminous 
presence, a pervading and persuasive personality. His work 
will stand for what it is worth, — and that it has grown to be 
thought of incontestable, and, to a largely increasing number, of 
inestimable value, this wonderfully representative gathering of 
many of the masters in art, literature, science and philosophy, 
abundantly attests. Aside from his great work, however, a 
great man attracts and rivets attention. Great in his simplicity, 
his naturalness transcends and triumphs over the pomp and cir- 
cumstance surrounding so many other illustrious names. Our 
friend Gilchrist has told us of the esteem in which Whitman is 
held in Great Britain, and, indeed, if he cannot consistently 
claim the merit of discovery, he at least makes a good case in 
showing that he speaks for a number of the distinguished literati 
of his realm in promoting a literary rennaissance which, but for 
them, might have awaited a later period for its full germination 
and development, and this while Whitman lived obscurely in the 
town which now does him so much honor. We acknowledge the 
debt, and appreciate the duty and devotion to a high ideal 
which made the message from our Friends Across the Seas 
possible. We can only retort in kind, that if we are not the 
original discoverers of British genius, the inspired authors of 
Albion have a greater host of admirers here than at home. In 
deference to the legal lights around me, I might have said 
" clientage," but as, in the absence of copyright, we are accused 
of stealing our foreign literary ware, perhaps our appreciation is 
not as substantial as our friends would have it. Still, we are not 
altogether parasitic, sucking the sap without imparting anything 
to the vitality of the parent tree. However true it might once 
have been that American books were not read, or that there 
were few or none to be read, we have swelled the volume and 
improved the quality of literature amazingly of later years. We 
have given the world, and especially the English-speaking race, 
many " names that were not born to die," and among them, we 
are glad to have the testimony of our eminent artist-guest, that, 
in the estimation of his critical countrymen, that of Whitman, 
like Leigh Hunt's lover of his fellow-men, leads all the rest. 

I have never searched for a clue to Whitman's popularity in the 
old world or the new. To me it has seemed manifest. Those 
who know the work know the man. Those who know the man 
cannot fail to absorb the work. There is nothing magniloquent 
or meretricious, no gilt nor gewgaws about him. He must have 
been born at a time when Nature, disgusted with the manner in 



44 ADDRESSES. 

which much of her handiwork had been marred by the artificial 
barriers to wholesome growth set up by stinted standards and 
stilted schoolmen, made the "effort" recommended to Mrs. 
Dombey, and gave us a creation that needed no betterment and 
could sustain no detriment. Hence his serene placidity when 
others are bothered about themselves or their neighbors, the 
little things of their little world, or the bigger things of the 
bigger world, which cursed spite ordained that they should set 
aright. He never quarrels with what is, and doesn't lie awake 
o' nights bothering over what is or is not to be. He knows his 
place (oh, rare knowledge !) in the universal plan, and fits into 
his niche as nicely and naturally as though born in it instead of 
growing into it. It is this absence of posing and prudery, this 
avoidance of parade, that makes Walt Whitman so lovable. It 
is the connecting link with our common humanity that makes 
the Olympian Jove our brother, and gods and mortals of the 
same essence. This it was that induced the colored cook to 
rush out and be the first to greet our guest this evening, and this 
it is that makes the day laborer feel that, without abatement of 
reverence, he may accost him familiarly. This " human 
critter," as Whitman calls it, as exemplified in himself, simpli- 
fies what, with arrogant assumption, would otherwise appear 
complex and confusing. His character, as s-aid, is the key to his 
work, and "Whoso speaketh with," and understandeth "the 
right voice," is already in communion, even though as widely 
separated " anywhere about the earth" as the moon from the 
tides. He who comes properly accredited with a sound mind in 
a sound body, divested of pretence and pedantry, can breathe 
in great draughts of space with him on the Open Road. It is this 
quality of comradeship with those who have no other letters 
patent than their own nobility of character that opens up through 
our anti-feudal philosopher a Democratic Vista heretofore closed 
through exclusive exactions, or only to be peered at, in the en- 
chantment lent by distance. To him, in accord with the laws of 
their environment, Cuffee is as worthy of consideration as the 
President. In the halls of authority he is not awed. In the 
presence of calamity he sobs, as a child, " Oh my Captain — 
my Father ! " Closing the eyes of so many in their last sleep, 
the grim messenger to others bears to him only healing on its 
wings. The scent of the bloom in lilac time is no simpler than 
the song of the mystic voices in the redwood tree, or the plaint 
of the bird for its mate. Like Donatello, who saw and heard in 
Nature sights and sounds that others knew not, his soul, true to 
itself and its kind, garners and gives forth secrets not taught in 
the schools, and to such a soul the closing scene can only offer 



BONSALL—EYRE. 



45 



that " Light" which Goethe, dying, vainly prayed for, his meta- 
physics and mysticism offering no clue to the Beyond. 



LINCOLN L. EYRE: Philadelphia. 

THE DEMOCRAT. 

This occasion is more than a personal tribute. It is a plain 
step forward in the instincts of the American people. After a 
century of banquets to politicians and commercial personages, 
it is more than gratifying to find even a handful of Americans 
willing to do special honor to the fittest representative of their 
indigenous literature. 

Whitman stands for what is best in American life. He is not 
only greater than the world yet knows, but greater than he himself 
will ever know. His personality — the atmosphere that envelops 
him, like a white cloud about some mountain peak — is more 
majestic than anything he has yet written. "Walt," says he, 
"you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?" No, 
not in a score of lifetimes! "I knew," said Iole, "that 
Hercules was a god the moment my eyes fell on him. When I 
beheld Theseus, I desired that I might see him offer battle, or at 
least guide his horses in the chariot-race ; but Hercules did not 
wait for a contest ; he conquered whether he stood or walked, or 
sat, or whatever thing he did." Such did Walt Whitman appear 
to my eyes to-night, at the threshold of yonder door, godlike and 
childlike, as with one characteristic sweep of the arm he raised 
his hat above his head, greeting us with dignified familiarity, a 
splendid symbol of the all-conquering spirit of democracy. 

Whitman's democracy is the foundation upon which will rest 
his most enduring fame. To-day we cannot put ourselves in 
touch with this, the most intricate riddle ever given to man. 
It eludes us. Huge and towering, it confronts us — another Gau- 
risankar, unclimbed yet. First came the revolutionary period ; 
a struggle of colonies (rather than men) for freedom. Then 
there was an injection of bastard democracy from France. Then 
began the long struggle for commercial independence ; then the 
longer struggle for the emancipation of slaves. During what 
period, out of those tumultuous years, did the American people, 
setting other issues aside, devote themselves to a serious and 
systematic study of democracy as a political science? 

The delusion now filling the general mind with the flattering 
belief that we have gloriously worked out a task, which in reality 
we have not yet begun, is appalling. It has bred, as an inevi- 



46 ADDRESSES. 

table result, the democracy that flourishes like a rank weed in 
these treacherously peaceful times. It has nourished a democ- 
racy that reeks with the foulest instincts and purposes, con- 
founding low breeding with humble birth, trampling upon the 
gentleman and ennobling the blackguard. But the gentleman 
will not slap the pick-pocket on the back and play the political 
harlot to gain his favor. So he must stand aside and hold to his 
virtue, and see the degradation of a people who cannot influ- 
ence their scurvy politicians, even to the building of a sewer or 
the cleaning of a street ; who can rule themselves in nothing. 
They can come together at a crisis, in a sort of town meeting, to 
patch up their long neglected affairs. Is this democracy? Is 
this a guarantee of the lasting qualities of free institutions ? On 
the contrary, we are rapidly developing a crisis which will take the 
shape of a cataclysm as radical as it will be tremendous ; a con- 
flict likely to be made up of elements absolutely novel and sur- 
prising, and that will shake the structure of this government to 
its deepest foundations. 

Then will come into play, for the first time, the marvellous 
genius of the poet who sang the "Song of Myself" and "By 
Blue Ontario's Shore.'"' Like a fertile land unexpectedly revealed 
out of a receding sea, the whole broad territory of Whitman's 
faith will startle an awakening world to a new conception of his 
promise and his meaning. Then our children will clearly see 
what we could but faintly discern, that when he cries for com- 
radeship with the lowliest man or thing he chants the true 
democracy. His song is a triumphant symphony in defense of 
nature. All human conventions must bend the knee. A leaf 
of grass is loftier than a cathedral. The citizen who would be 
free must find all life within himself, " must rule the empire of 
himself, being himself alone." America, if she would endure, 
must welcome the self-confidence rather than the self-abandon- 
ment of her people. Welcome to thee, at the appointed time, 
O true republic ! Welcome then, and not till then, democ- 
racy ! Whitman, the mortal, outstripping thee by a hundred 
years, moves with contented spirit toward the ivory gate, ready- 
to sink into the arms of nature, as a child falls to sleep upon its 
mother's breast. Whitman, the immortal, awaits thy coming. 



LETTERS 



OVER-SEA 



OVER-LAND 



Hallam Tennyson, 49 

Wm. M. Rossetti, 49 

Gabriel Sarrazin, 50 

T. W. Rolleston, 51 

William Morris, 51 

Edward Dowden, 51 

Mary Whitall Costelloe, 52 

Rudolf Schmidt, 53 

Edward Carpenter, 54 

John Hay, 54 • 

R. Pearsall Smith, 54 



John Burroughs, 55 
Richard Maurice Bucke, 56 
William Sloane Kennedy, 58 
Sidney H. Morse, 59 
Edmund Clarence Stedman, 60 
Frank B. Sanborn, 61 
William Dean Howells, 62 
John G. Whittier, 62 
Sylvester Baxter, 62 
T. B. Aldrich, 63 
Felix Adler, 63 
Horace Howard Furness, 64 
George W. Childs, 64 

J. F. Garrison, 



Mark Twain, 64 
Will Carleton, 05 
William M. Salter, 66 
John W. Chadwick, 66 
George H. Boker, 66 
John A. Cockrill, 66 
Julius Chambers, 67 
George William Curtis, 67 
Jeannette L. Gilder, 67 
John Habberton, 67 
William C. Gannett, 68 
H. D. Bush, 68 
Richard J. Hinton, 68 



68 



(47) 



[From an article by EDWARD BERTZ, in the " Deutsche Presse, 
Organ des Deutschen Schriftsteller-Yerbandes," Berlin, 
June 2, 1SS9.] 

Wait Whitman was bor?i May 31. 1S19, at West Hills, on Long 
Island, in the State of New York, and we now celebrate his 
finishing his seventieth year. A paralytic stroke broke a 
his farmer robust constitution many years ago, but through all 
sufferings he has preserved a calm, cheerful soul, while his 
mind has conserved its youthful freshness. U^iat he wrote 
appears in two volumes — his poems in "Leaves of Grass,' ' 
and his prose in "Specimen Days and Collect." . . . TJiis is 
merely a commemoration of his jubilee. If these lines should 
reach him across the sea, they ??iay express the wish to our 
august friend that the love he devoted to the hundred thousand 
wounded and sick soldiers. North and South, during three 
years of war, on the fields and in hospitals, may be partially 
reciprocated by devoted friends in his age and affliction. Loi'e 
is the foundation of his poetry, and will as surely continue 
to bear it: fruit during ensuing centuries as other great ideas 
have done heretofore ; while from our half barbaric civ: 
tion his own consoling words will sweetly compel the hearing 
of future generations : 

"Over the : :se prophetic a voice, 

Be zrten'd, affection shall solve the problems of freedom yet , 

Those who love each other shall become invincible, 
They shall yet make Columbia victorious." 



(48) 



LETTERS. 



Hallam Tennyson— -from his father, Lord Tennyson : ( To H. 
H. Gilchrist): Farringford, Freshwater, Isle of Wight, 
June 22, 1889. 

My father has been yachting in the Sunbeam. He thanks you 
for your letter : he is not up to writing. 

Your banquet and speech seem to have been a great success. 
All congratulations. 

William M. Rossetti : 5 Endsleigh Gardens, London, N. W., 
England, June 7, 1889. 

I am obliged for your letter of 24 May, enclosing a pro- 
gramme of the "Whitman Testimonial," or dinner in honor 
of Walt Whitman, which was fixed for 31 May, the seventieth 
anniversary of his birth ; and inviting me to send " some expres- 
sion touching the season and the man." 

I will only say that I most heartily sympathize in any demon- 
stration, of honor and love towards this great and good American 
— a man who, whilst specially and personally American in all 
his feelings, thoughts and utterances, has, beyond almost all men 
in literature, gone down to the roots of the human heart, and 
spoken the word for all the world. I myself always have honored 
and loved him, and always shall do so. I consider him to be pre- 
eminent among the sons of men for a large human nature — 
broad, deep and glowing — and for the power of giving the 
deepest and most universal expression to the deepest and most 
universal feelings. With heart and with mind he embraces more 
than other men do, and with voice he proclaims more. This is, 
I think, his great and admirable excellence as writer or poet ; 
and is quite enough for numbering Whitman among the great 
poetic souls of the world — whatever may be his qualifications in 
point of form or of diction. On this matter — were I to express 
my exact opinion — I could say a good deal, partly to praise and 

3 (49) 



50 LETTERS. 

partly to demur : but it is a subordinate (tho' far from an unim- 
portant) matter, and for the present I leave it alone. 

Honor and love to Walt Whitman. This tribute is due from 
Americans, from Englishmen and from all races of men, be they 
the foremost or the backward races. 

Gabriel Sarrazin : Paris, France — {written fro?n 67 George 
Street, Enston Road, London, N. W., England, June 12, 
1889). 

Kindly excuse me for not earlier responding to the letter in 
which you announce the celebration of the seventieth anniversary 
of Walt Whitman's birth, in Camden. Your message found me 
in London, where I came to pass a month, and I would have 
wished to write you as soon as I received it ; but my health is 
not always good, and sometimes does not permit me to do what 
I desire. 

If I had been with you on the 31st of May last, this, in sub- 
stance, is what I would have said in restatement of my views 
upon the works of the noble poet : 

Walt Whitman is, in my opinion, one of the only two living 
beings — the other is Count Leon Tolstoi — to whom is applicable, 
the name of Apostle. And, if I could permit myself to make a 
comparison between two men equally great, I would not hesitate 
to place Whitman one degree above Tolstoi. Notwithstanding 
the evangelical goodness of the latter, there is in him too much 
philosophical pessimism, and Whitman seems to have a wider 
and surer outlook. He is the only man who has absolutely 
known that Man is an indivisible fragment of the universal 
Divinity, that the heart of a man truly pious knows how to 
humble itself without appeal in the adoration of the Cosmos, 
and that instead of losing himself in useless dissertations on the 
greater or less superiority of this tradition or that religious con- 
fession or some other, a man would do much better to love and 
to serve truly his fellow-creatures : that is the whole of Divinity, 
because who loves his fellows loves God. This view, of which 
Whitman has been, in this era, the practical apostle — this view 
will renovate the world. 

Such, dear sir, is what I would have said if I had been among 
you on the 31st of May last; and, then I would have lifted, in 
my turn, my glass, wishing very long life to the august old man, 
and assuring him of my love. 

Please, dear sir, transmit to all the friends of Walt Whitman, 
in Camden, my sentiments of cordial sympathy; and believe 
me also very sincerely yours. 



ROLLESTON— MORRIS— DOWDEN. 51 

T. W. Rolleston : Dublin, Ireland, June 8, 1889. 

You invite me to contribute a word of congratulation to the 
pamphlet which will commemorate Walt Whitman's attainment 
of his seventieth birthday. I wish the praise and thanks I give 
him were better worth having ; but he at least does not value 
such things solely for the distinction of the giver. I rejoice to 
think that my name will be linked with other worthier ones, and 
with his, the worthiest of all, on this occasion. What I owe to 
him is among those best and largest things which are not to be 
defined in human speech. He it is who has rendered truly sweet 
and wholesome to me whatever else I have gained from life and 
literature. 

. What a triumph of faith and sincerity is denoted by this 
celebration ! It is well that the memory of the wide world's 
greatest friend should be linked with proud and joyful thoughts, 
not with those of pity and indignation. This is the gain which 
a life prolonged beyond the completion of his appointed task 
has brought to the many who now love him, and the multitudes 
who will do so. Give him, from one of the former, my hearty 
good wishes and congratulations. 

William Morris : Kelmscott House, Upper Mall, Hammersmith, 
London, England, June 11, 1889. 

I thank you- for the opportunity you have given me to send 
my heartiest greetings to Walt Whitman ; I have the greatest 
respect for a man who has shown himself at once so friendly and 
sympathetic, and so independent. I look upon him as one of 
those men who may be called the material for poetry ; men 
without whom poetry would degenerate into a mere literary 
trick, insincere and empty, valueless to all who set a true value 
on life, as our friend does. Once again I beg you to give my 
greetings to Walt Whitman as to a personal friend, although I 
have never seen him. 

Edward Dowden: Dublin, Ireland, June 3, 1889. 

I rejoice greatly in the fact that at threescore years and ten 
Walt Whitman, in Camden, has " that which should accompany 
old age — honor, love, obedience, troops of friends." We who 
are far away have a fraternal feeling towards his American 
friends and neighbors who have a care and reverence for the 
Good Gray Poet. 

During some twenty years I have watched with interest the 
growth of his fame (and " fame," Shelley tells us, is " love dis- 



52 LETTERS. 

guised ") in England and in other countries of Europe. And 
now the obstacles have yielded, and there are wide roads of 
access to what is best in his work. 

His elder years have rounded the work of his earlier man- 
hood. His last volume shows him as the cheerful poet of old 
age, the cheerful poet of physical infirmity; while his earlier 
poems showed him especially as the poet of youth and lusty 
vitality. The later writings seem to me to reflect a beautiful 
light — clear and serene — on his previous work. And that light, 
we feel, comes from the man himself, whose whole bearing 
towards life — joys and sorrows, and evil repute and good 
repute, and sickness and health, and manhood and old age — and 
towards not life alone but also death, has been noble. 

May you and we join in 1899 to celebrate his eightieth birth- 
day ! And may he bring us a few December Fagots then in 
succession to his " November Boughs " ! I know they will give 
pleasant welcome, and will sparkle cheerily, however dark may 
be the days. 

Mary Whitall Costelloe: London, England, June 25, 1889. 

I was away from home at the time your letter of May 25th 
came, and I have not been able to reply to it before. I regret 
the delay very much, .... as I should very much have liked 
to be included in the list of those who observed Mr. Whitman's 
birthday with respect and affectionate remembrance. But I fear 
I am altogether too late 

I think I have learned to appreciate Mr. Whitman's work bet- 
ter in the four years I have been living in England. I have 
seemed to myself to reach a fairer judgment of American 
tendencies and of the spirit of the American democracy, because 
I see them as compared with another civilization and a different set 
of political ideas. And I feel more sure now than I could have 
felt before, that Walt Whitman's poems are the perfect artistic 
reflection of his country. You cannot really understand America 
without Walt Whitman, without " Leaves of Grass" : I should 
say, without America. He has expressed that civilization " up to 
date," as he would say, and no student of the philosophy of 
history can do without him. I am not surprised that the Eng- 
lish are quicker to recognize this than Americans themselves, 
and I think it is a tribute to the fidelity of his work, for there is 
no task harder than to make people see themselves as they really 
are. England of the present day has no such exponent of her 
life and thought, nor do I know of any living writer, unless it be 
Ibsen, who has even made the effort to write the epic of his 



COS TELL OE—SCHMID T. 



53 



country's civilization. And Ibsen, with his special doctrines, 
is very different from Walt Whitman's catholic acceptance and 
reproduction of all the tendencies, all the forces, at work in 
America. 

Quite apart from its work as a teacher, as a l 'cheerer of men's 
hearts," " Leaves of Grass " is an imperishable artistic monument 
of the most complex and the most hopeful civilization in the 
world. 

Personally, the privilege of knowing Walt Whitman has been 
always one of the greatest privileges of my life, and I can never 
cease to be grateful to him-for his kindliness to me. It makes 
me very envious to think of you who can see him often ! When 
you see him next, tell him, please, that I have said that a day 
never passes without our talking of him and* wishing for his 
presence. 

Rudolf Schmidt: Copenhagen, Denmark, June 4, 1889. 

I do not express myself with great ability in the English 
language, for which reason my " testimonial " in behalf of Walt 
Whitman must be very short. What I have to say about him as 
poet and thinker, I have laid down in a published essay, which 
perhaps more nearly exhausts its great theme than many other 
subsequent essays to the same purpose. 

To me " Democratic Vistas " is the far-shining pinnacle of all 
that Walt Whitman has done. These few sheets represent a 
whole literature ; they range their author among the great seers 
of all times. 

These northern Scandinavian countries are perhaps the best 
field for such broad democratic views. Recently, a rector of a 
school in Slesorg wrote me that he had read my translation of 
•'Democratic Vistas" again and again, he did not know how 
many times. " Nordslesorgsk Sondagsblad," the valiant cham- 
pion of the Danish language as against the systematical German- 
isation of an old Danish province, published in May a whole 
series of articles on Walt Whitman. The sturdy Slesvic peasants 
know him very well. 

My deceased friend, Dr. Rosenberg, was among the antago- 
nists of Walt Whitman. His son Magiste Tete Andreas Rosen- 
berg, my favorite scholar, has lately written a hymn to Walt 
Whitman that was reprinted in the above-named weekly, and 
his little son is baptized Walt. 

To me the fact includes a symbol ! Of course I expect that 
you will communicate to Walt Whitman the tenor of this letter. 
It will, I hope, warm his old heart as a sunbeam. He has a right 



54 



LETTERS. 



to say tc Omen Accipio." To-day the genius of the future is 
greeting him. 

Edward Carpenter: Millihorpe, near Chesterfield, England, 
May 18, 1889. 

Dear Walt ; — I now send you on with loving remembrances 
and good wishes, our little contribution to the record of your birth- 
day . . . from Bessie and Isabella Ford, William, Ethel and Ar- 
thur Thompson, and myself. . . . Glad that you notch another 
birthday among us — tho' I fear the time is often wearisome to 
you. The spring comes again with the cuckoo and the corn- 
crake calling all day long, and the grass growing thick about our 
feet already (very early this year), and the trees all in leaf — the 
old vigor somewhere down, the perennial source which, even in 
extreme age, I guess people sometimes feel within them. I trust 
you have still good friends near you. and do not feel cut off 
from those that are remote. Ernest Rhys has just sent me some 
lines or verses of greeting to you — but perhaps he will send them 
himself. I heard from Bucke a fortnight a°;o telling me he had 
been with you. 

I have just been weeding strawberries and come in to write 
you these few lines. All goes well with me. I am brown and 
hardy — and tho' I live mostly alone, have more friends almost 
than a man ought to have. Some kind of promise keeps floating 
to us always, luring us on. With much love to you, dear Walt, 
as always. 

Edward Carpenter: London, England, June 4, 1S89. 

Many thanks for your note. . . . We drink a health also here 
to the Good Poet, whom we do not forget — but think of him and 
love him just the same as ever. 

John Hay: London, England, June iS, 18S9. 

I deeply regret that I was absent from the country on the day 
of your testimonial to my dear and honored old friend, Walt 
Whitman, and that I was not informed of your intentions in 
time to join my expressions of affection and regard to those of 
his hosts of friends. 

R. Pearsall Smith: London, England, June 4, 1889. 

Y - of May 24th did not reach me in season to telegraph a 
iage for the dinner of the 31st to Walt Whitman. I am sorry 
that I could not be present wich his other friends. 



BURROUGHS. 55 

John Burroughs: West Park, JV. K, May 30, 1889. 

Dear Friends : I am with you in spirit on this occasion, if 
not in body. I should be with you in body also, but my body, 
these late years, is that of a farmer, reluctant to move, unused to 
festive halls and festive occasions, and mortgaged to a very ex- 
acting bit of land. But my heart is with you, and it is full of 
love for the glorious old poet whose seventieth birthday you have 
met to celebrate. There is no disguising the solicitude we have 
all felt about the state of his health the past year, and in view of 
this fact I think I may frankly congratulate you that you have 
come together to praise Caesar and not to bury him. 

It is a source of great joy to me that he has reached this moun- 
tain top of human years, not without weariness and a broken, fal- 
tering step the past decade, but with no abatement of his serenity, 
his hope, and the helpful cheer and courage of his spirit. Old 
age may be a valley leading down and down, as it has been so 
often depicted, but I always think of Walt Whitman as on the 
heights, and when I make my annual or semi-annual pilgrimage 
to visit him, I always find him on the heights — at least never in 
the valley of doubt and despond or of spiritual decrepitude — al- 
ways tonic and uplifting. Does he look like a man of valleys 
and shadows ? Does he not rather look like a man of the broad 
high table-lands, where his spirit has always travelled ; or of the 
shore, where the primordial ocean has breathed upon him and 
moulded him ? At any rate, the spirit which he has put into his 
poems is akin to these things, and goes with the largest types and 
the most healthful and robust activity. It is hardly necessary 
for me to repeat at any length here, what I have so often said about 
Whitman's poems. Let me name but one point, namely, that 
they offset and correct a strongly marked tendency among us as 
a people to over-refinement or attenuation of form. As a nation, 
we are quick, bright, ingenious, deft, but there is a decay of the 
broader and mere fundamental human qualities. We lack mass, 
inertia, and therefore, power. Our literature is thin and delicate. 
There is not enough blood, and body, "and viscera in it. The 
character and conscience of the nation are a prey to our intel- 
lectual smartness and cleverness. In "Leaves of Grass" these 
things are corrected. Here the type is large, robust, sympathetic, 
generous, and truly democratic. And this type is not didacti- 
cally shown or exploited, but is dramatically illustrated. We see 
it moving and breathing, a living penetrating personality, among 
the realities of life — American life. Indeed, I have no hesitation 
in saying that " Leaves of Grass " is charged with the quality of 
a live man — not of his mind merely, but of his body also, his 



56 



LETTERS. 



presence — as no other modern poem is. This does not make it 
acceptable to the popular taste, but it makes it a real and a living 
production, and a well-spring of stimulating human influences. 
The great poem must appeal to something more than our sense 
of the beautiful, indispensable as this is. There is our sense of 
power, our sense of life, our sense of magnitude, our sense of the 
universal, our religious and patriotic sense — all these must be 
addressed also. 

There is in current criticism an assumption, often stated, often 
implied, that the sole office of literature is to amuse, to entertain. 
The poet is a nimble skater who cuts curious and beautiful flour- 
ishes up and down over the deeps and shallows of life. The mass 
of current poetry aims at little more than this. English poetry 
in general has aimed at little more than this ; that is, it has no 
deep spiritual significance; the great currents are untouched, 
uninfluenced by it. But if this can be said of Whitman's poetry, 
then it is a failure. His work has deepest reference to patriotism, 
to nationality, to character, and to those things that make life 
strong and full. It bears the stamp of profound conviction and 
seriousness, and if it does not do something more to you than 
merely to entertain you, it will not do that. But I must not con- 
tinue in this strain. 

It is now twenty-five years since I first made the personal ac- 
quaintance of our poet, and over twenty years since I first used 
my pen in his behalf. The memory of those years, those years 
in Washington, during the latter half of the war and later, I think 
will be the last to leave me. My life since then has been poor 
and thin in comparison. Those walks and talks, the great events 
that filled the air, Whitman in the pride and power of his man- 
hood, the eloquent and chivalrous spirit of William D. O'Connor, 
so lately passed away, and whose presence among you to-day, as 
I knew him then, would be like music and banners, my own 
eager youth and enthusiasm — all combine to make those years 
the most memorable of my life. But they are gone ; a quarter 
of a century has passed, O'Connor is no more, our Good.Gray 
Poet, whom he so gallantly defended, has reached his seventieth 
year, and I am sequestered here, on the banks of the Hudson, 
delving in the soil and trying to give the roots of my life a fresh 
start, looking wistfully to the past, hungering for the old friends 
of the old days, and regretting many things, among others, re- 
gretting that I am not with you and sharing your festivities on 
this occasion. 

Richard Maurice Bucke: Londo?i, Ontario, May 22, 1889. 
It was a good thought to mark, as you are doing, the day upon 



BUCKE. 



57 



which our great friend attains to the age of threescore and ten 
years; and when I say that I wish I could be with you, and 
grieve that I cannot, believe me, these are no mere formal 
words. 

The friend whom we to-day seek to honor is no ordinary man, 
and it is well that all of us who have some appreciation of what 
he is — how great and beneficent his life has been — it is well, I 
say, that we should, on all suitable occasions, manifest our affec- 
tion and reverence. 

You will not expect that within the narrow compass of a letter 
I should try to say, even in brief, what our poet has for the last 
twenty-five years been to me, and what to-day are my feelings 
towards him. Should I attempt, in my crude, bald phrases, to 
make such a statement, I should expect nothing else than to be 
charged with gross exaggeration. I will not make any such at- 
tempt, but will simply state, that as my life has advanced from 
youth until now past middle age, a closer and closer knowledge 
of Walt Whitman and his writings has served more and more to 
deepen my early conviction that in this man the modern world 
has the embodiment of its highest ideal of manhood ; that in fact, 
as a distinguished living writer once said to me, " Walt Whitman 
is the Saviour, the Redeemer, of the modern world. ' ' And I want 
to say, that however absurd or even blasphemous such words may 
sound to some, they were originally spoken in all seriousness and 
reverence, and are repeated now deliberately and with a full re- 
alization of their profound significance. 

Walt Whitman has (as I believe) lived the highest life yet. 
That life will be more and more studied and emulated, will sink 
deeper and deeper into the heart of the race, until the social, hu- 
man world, through his aid, will reach a level hitherto unattained, 
even unlooked for. For this new life, so far undreamed, buried in 
the vast womb of the future, has not yet become, to the world at 
large, an object even of aspiration. But the spark has been set 
to the prepared fuel, the living glow has crept deeply into the 
dormant mass, even now tongues of flame begin to shoot forth. 
Within no long time the fire will burst out and be seen by all. 

Thirty-four years ago Walt Whitman wrote : " The proof of a 
poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has 
absorbed it." This proof, in his case, is even now being given. 
The absorption has begun and will go on ; nothing can arrest it. 
Within fifty years our great poet (far better known then than to 
his closest friends at present) will stand out before all eyes the 
typical American — that is to say, the typical modern — the source 
and centre of a new spiritual aspiration saner and manlier than 
any heretofore. Say to my friends how dearly I should like to 



58 LETTERS. 

join them in personal greetings to our loved and honored Good 
Gray Poet. 

William Sloane Kennedy: Belmont, Mass., May 26, 1889. 

The celebration of our revered friend's seventieth birthday is- 
first of all a tribute of personal affection. But in the large point 
of view Walt Whitman is precious to humanity for the general 
principles he presents and represents — for his superb sketch of a 
moral life based on deepest scientific philosophy. He is the 
evangelist of the human heart, and the prototype of the brain 
and body of the future. The office of such men, in the world 
economy, is to break up stereotyped thought and institutions, 
and set free the creative force again ; and the hammer that 
smites, and the arrow that flies, and the hand that wields, are 
not tools of the deity, but are deity itself at work. 

Having myself fought my way out of the thorny and beg- 
garly wilderness of Christian "orthodoxy," Walt Whitman 
has been to me chiefly of value for his manly ethics and 
his fresh and joyous paganism — in such quick opposition to 
the sickly anti-naturalism of historical Christianity. And I 
think this liberative influence of his words is spreading far 
and wide. Every week brings evidence. He is studied and 
magazined at Rome, Paris, London, Edinburgh and St. Peters- 
burg. From Zurich we have recently received a volume of 
excellent translations out of "Leaves of Grass;" in Paris M.' 
Sarrazin has brought out in book form one of the best estimates 
of Whitman yet published ; while from all parts of Great Britain, 
he is ever and anon receiving letters of heartfelt acknowledg- 
ment. Doubtless the rapidity and extent of the circulation of 
"Leaves of Grass" in Great Britain are partly due to the ap- 
pearance there of clipped editions. Whitman's revolutionary 
doctrine of the body would otherwise have made the diffusion of 
his works nearly as slow there as here. In a recent story in 
Harpers 1 Monthly, an American writer represents one of her 
English characters as quoting from Walt Whitman in conversa- 
tion, and adds with stinging satire, " No American present 
recognized the quotation." Yet it is unnecessary to say that in 
the higher literary circle and the manly circles of America, 
Whitman is ardently loved. 

Here in the eastern New England section of the country, one 
notes in the representative people, the stiff and severe pharisaism 
of the Puritan type. English cant in religion, and grasping greed 
in business, strike hands with the haughty intellectual pride of 
Harvard College conservatism, and scowl upon any brave foray 



KENNED Y— MORSE. 



59 



out of the ranks of conventionalism. In his New York In- 
auguration address, even our genial New Englander, James Russell 
Lowell, says (on the general theme of American literature), " It 
would be more profitable to think that we have as yet no litera- 
ture in the highest sense, than to insist that what we have should 
be judged by other than admitted standards, merely because it 
is ours." Surely, there spoke the very spirit of Cambridge 
scholasticism. Imagine the wise dons of Michael Angelo's 
time shaking their heads and saying, " These sculptures won't 
do j they are not approved by the admitted standards." So the 
French thought Shakspere's incomparable creations the wild- 
est rant, because not judgeable by "the admitted standards." 
And similar criticisms were bestowed at first upon the poems of 
Hugo, the paintings of Turner and the musical dramas of 
Wagner. Let the dons then keep within their walls. Their at- 
mosphere is fatal to genius. Science is a good thing, but it is not 
poetry and it is the antithesis of art. The study of Greek and 
Roman life especially is strangely productive of haughty aristo- 
cratic pride. To the class of intellectual aristocrats Walt Whit- 
man might say in the words of Browning's jolly Aristophanes : 

"Away pretence to some exclusive sphere 
Cloud-nourishing a sole selected few 
Fume-fed with self-superiority ! 
I stand up for the common coarse-as-clay existence, 



Make haste from your unreal eminence 

And measure lengths with me upon that ground." 

Well, dear Walt, accept a thousand good wishes from one 
who, though he first knew you late in your life (1880), still finds 
that in you the snows of age have not quenched the fire of love, 
and though encountering much that is baffling in that impassive 
Dutch-English nature of yours, yet perseveres in signing himself 
a candidate for your affection. As I write (in the open air) a 
fresh open breeze is setting in (I glimpse sails and the white- 
gleaming sea- water over yonder beyond Medford) and is blowing 
around the old lane (erst trod by the feet of young Emerson) the 
honey-smelling fragrance of wild cherry blossoms. We still have a 
hope that the early season will bring on the rosebuds in time for 
your birthday. But if it should not do so, look for them later. 

Sidney H. Morse: Chicago, Ills., May 27, i88q. 

Could I be present with you at the celebration of Walt*s 
seventieth birthday, it would yield me great and lasting pleasure. 
But I am here on the "Open Road," doing such work as falls 



60 LETTERS. 

to me, and cannot leave it now and turn back even to greet our 
good friend and comrade with birthday congratulations and 
love. 

There are those living in my memory — Walt conspicuous 
among them — who are in no way represented by years. I never 
think of their age. They are simply themselves — the same 
yesterday, to-day and forever. They are, to quote our poet, 
" Time always without break." I have learned this well, becom- 
ing acquainted with the different persons of whom I have sought 
to give some account in clay. "At what age? " I am asked; 
and have to reply, to be serious and truthful— "At no age. I 
have sought for the personality, the mental poise, the spirit, the 
out-look. What is it he is? What does he see? How he 
salutes me — not by years, few or many, but as a living soul." 

These, and such as these, are the questions I delight to answer 
in my clay, and with words when I can find them. 

So, now, turning to Walt Whitman, that he is seventy does 
not much signify. That he will ever be other than alive is a 
thought that does not cross my mind. One of the eternal 
verities he must be and would be though he had never written 
his book. But with his poems comes anew the word that, by 
whomsoever spoken, does not pass away. It is a new clue to the 
Infinite beyond. 

"I tramp," he says, "a perpetual journey" — 
And— 

" To look up and down no road but it stretches and waits for you, however 
long but it stretches and waits for you. 



" To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for travelling 
souls." 

Walt is the soul-traveller? 

Democratic, for he would greet, and have along with him, all 
souls else. 

And this is why he is " a maker of poems." 

" The maker of poems settles justice, reality, immortality, 
His insight and power encircle things and the human race." 

Edmund Clarence Stedman: "Kelp Rock" New Castle, N. 
If., May 27, 1889. 

Thank you for inviting me, as one of Walt Whitman's friends, 
to join the festival in honor of our poet's seventieth birthday. 
You know it would give me satisfaction to be with you. But 



STED31AN— SANBORN. 61 

your letter, which has now followed me here, reached New York 
after I had left upon a brief visit to this island, being in need 
of relief from illness and continuous work. All I can do is to 
give my heartiest love to Whitman, with congratulations upon 
his entering, with Lowell, the decade of life which Whittier and 
Holmes have so lustily rounded. For him, too, in his own fine 
phrase, "from noon to starry night," may the omens be pro- 
pitious! Long may it be ere we are called upon to say to Walt 
Whitman, 

" The untold want by life and land ne'er granted, 
Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find." 

Frank B. Sanborn: Concord, Mass., May 29, 1889. 

The name of my ancient friend, Walt Whitman, does indeed 
awaken in me a response ; for at no time, since Emerson directed 
my attention to his " Leaves of Grass " in 1855, have I failed to 
notice what he was saying or doing. Not always with complete 
approval, of course ; that he did not expect, nor indeed wish, as 
I suppose ; his course through his own time being made, like the 
course of a boat through the water, by the resistance of the sur- 
rounding medium to his efforts. If the water should not resist 
and push against our oars, which of us could make any headway ? 
-But the voyage of Whitman has been a bold and forward one, 
guided by the stars and not by the winds and currents ; he has 
tugged manfully at the oars and has had his own compass to 
steer by. I lament that it is now so nearly over, and that my 
"little boat must apparently run on for a few years without having 
his noble barge within hail. Such are the conditions of this 
world's navigation, to which none of my contemporaries have 
known how to submit more gracefully than Whitman, — taking his 
orders, as we all must, from that great sailing-master whose is the 
fleet and the ocean, and the seaman himself. 

I would fain send a message to Whitman, on this special occa- 
sion, since I cannot be present with him and you and all his 
friends. And it shall be averse from my neighbor Ellery Chan- 
ning, who alone of surviving American poets can vie with Whit- 
man in the grand manner of the older singers : 

" Brave be thy heart, O sailor of the world ! 
Erect thy vision, strong and resolute. 
Let disappointments strike, and leaden days 
Visit thee like a snowdrift across flowers ; 
Even in a little this rude voyage is done ; 
Then heave the time-stained anchor, trim thy sails, 
And o'er the bosom of the untrammelled deep 
Ride in the heavenly boat and touch near stars." 



6 2 LET TEES. 

William Dean Howells: Boston, Mass., May 21, 1SS9. 

I am too far away to be able to dine with you in celebration 
of the seventieth birthday of the great poet whom you share with 
the whole English-speaking world. But I am not too far to wish 
him, through you, health and larger and larger life. It will be a 
long life here in the memories of all who know how to value a 
liberator in anv kind. 

J 

John G. Whtitjlkr : Amesbury, Mass., May 24, 1889. 

I have received thy kind letter and the invitation to the pro- 
posed observance ofW. Whitman's seventieth birthday. At my 
age and in my state of health I can only enclose a slight token 
of good-will, with the wish that he may have occasion to thank 
God for renewed health and many more birthdays, and for the 
consolation which must come from the recollection of generous 
services rendered to the sick and suffering Union soldiers in the 
hospitals of Washington during the Civil War. 

Sylvester Baxter: Boston, Mass., May 29, 1S89. 

I wish I might give adequate expression to my regret at ina- 
bility to attend your celebration of our great poet's seventieth 
birthday. I am indebted to my friend and colleague, Frederick 
Russell Guernsey, of the Herald, and now resident in Mexico, 
for my first knowledge of the greatness and beauty of Whitman's 
verse. Before, I had shared the average prejudice born of igno- 
rance ; but when I had once been persuaded to read his grand 
words, a new world of glory and beauty was opened to my vision. 
Among my pieasantest recollections is that of first meeting Whit- 
man when he came to Boston to read his lecture on the anniver- 
sary of Lincoln's death, and of the many delightful hours passed 
with him on his subsequent visit, when he spent several w 
here preparing his completed -'Leaves of Grass" for publica- 
tion. 

When I think of what I would like to say I remember "Leaves 
of Grass," and that it has all been said there. But as I write, the 
thought occurs to me that this is the month of the Laurel's 
bloom; that I have just seen the starry flowers illuminating its 
evergreen masses with their pure brightness on the mountain-top* 
about Chattanooga — the historic heights of Lookout, and of 
Walden's Ridge — and that, speeding homewards, I saw the same 
glorious- floral clusters adorning the New England hillsides. Our 
national flower, then, should be the Mountain Laurel, whose 
branches form the crown of poets and of heroes — that, as we see 



BAX TER—ALDRICH—A DLER. 63 

it blooming from South to North, tells us as we gaze that our 
country is one, reunited in bonds stronger than ever. 

Of all the honored men whom America rightly loves as its 
poets, and who, on the day that sees them reach the end of seven 
decades, have bared their heads to receive the laurel wreath from 
their fellows, I hail Walt Whitman as the greatest — the one who 
has attained the largest measure of a great individuality in iden- 
tifying himself with his fellows of all degrees ; in his wonderful 
sympathy, that has enabled him to live their lives and think their 
thoughts, to sound the dark depths of human nature and soar 
high in the illimitable expanse of the human soul. The verdict 
of posterity will be, I believe, that no other poet whom our rich 
century has known has so grandly achieved the task set to all 
men by the divine impulse implanted in every bosom, of epito- 
mizing in one individual the life of the world. 

America owes Walt Whitman her everlasting gratitude for the 
high standard of patriotic aspiration and duty he has set in his 
words for his countrymen, and whose sacred torch shall be passed 
down the centuries by the unknown bearers they shall inspire, 
bound together by the invisible ties of comradeship, continually 
lighting the way that leads the race towards as yet unimaginable 
heights rising in the broadening perspective of "Democratic 
Vistas." By learning the lesson that only by living each for all, 
and all for each, can true and great individuality be attained, we 
shall see the grand words, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, in 
their real meanings, and make them the foundation for our Na- 
tion that without them can be but the mockery of its form. As 
one of the humblest of those comrades, and with honor and love 
for Walt Whitman, I inscribe myself. 

T. B. Aldrich: Boston, Mass., May 20, 1889. 

I have just returned from a vacation, and shall not be able to 
leave home again so soon, or I would certainly make the pilgrim- 
age to Camden to greet Walt Whitman on his seventieth birth- 
day. ... I did myself the honor awhile ago to remind W. W. 
of my remembrance of him. 

Felix Adler: New York, May 18, 1889. 

It is altogether lamentable that I must miss the dinner. . . . 
I am sure you know, and Walt Whitman will appreciate, what a 
sacrifice it is for me to stay away, and how much and how affec- 
tionately I am in harmony with those who will sit around the 
festive board. . . . It is no mere facon parler to say that I sin- 
cerely regret my inability to be present. 



64 LETTERS. 

Horace Howard Furness: Wallingford, Pa., May 27, 1889. 

I deeply regret that my engagements will not possibly permit 
me to be present, and that I cannot thus testify my respect and 
admiration for him whom you will meet to honor. He has lived 
to find — 

" The stubborn thistles bursting 
Into glossy purples, which out-redden 
All voluptuous garden roses." 

From the heights of a life invincibly true to the ideals of his 
youth, unswerving throughout in his honesty, standing "four- 
square to all the winds that blow," with a heart instantly sensi- 
tive to every impulse of beauty, he must know of a surety that 
"eternal sunshine will settle on his head." With profound re- 
spects to him and thanks to you. * 

George W. Childs: Philadelphia, May 22, 1889.* 

My Dear Old Friend — I want to be present to congratulate 
you on your seventieth birthday, and to tell you how glad I am 
that kind Providence has preserved your health, and given you 
as many appreciative friends. God bless you. 

Mark Twain: Hartford, Conn., May 24, 1889. 

To Wall WJiitman — You have lived just the seventy years 
which are greatest in the world's history, and richest in benefit 
and advancement to its peoples. These seventy years have done 
much more to widen the interval between man and the other 

* Enclosed was a printed slip, reading as follows : 

Cambridge, March 13, 1S77. 

My Dear Mr. Childs— -You do not know yet, what it is to be seventy years 
old. I will tell you, so that you may not be taken by surprise, when your 
turn comes. 

It is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see 
behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you 
other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or 
may not. Then you sit down and meditate, and wonder which it will be. 

That is the whole story, amplify it as you may. All that one can say is, 
that life is opportunity. 

With seventy good wishes lo the dwellers on Walnut Street, corner of 
Twenty-second, Yours very truly, 

Henry W. Longfellow. 



TWAIN— CARLETON. 6 5 

animals than was accomplished by any five centuries which pre- 
ceded them. 

What great births you have witnessed ! The steam-press, the 
steamship, the steel-ship, the railroad, the perfected cotton-gin, 
the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the photograph, 
the photogravure, the electrotype, the gaslight, the electric light, 
the sewing-machine, and the amazing, infinitely varied and in- 
numerable products of coal-tar, those latest and strangest marvels 
of a marvelous age. And you have seen even greater births than 
these ; for you have seen the application of anaesthesia to surgery- 
practice, whereby the ancient dominion of pain, which began 
with the first created life, came to an end in this earth forever ; 
you have seen the slave set free ; you have seen monarchy ban- 
ished from France, and reduced in England to a machine which 
makes an imposing show of diligence and attention to business, 
but isn't connected with the works. Yes, you have indeed seen 
much ; but tarry yet awhile, for the greatest is yet to come. 
Wait thirty years, and then look out over the earth ! You shall 
see marvels upon marvels added to these whose nativity you have 
witnessed ; and conspicuous above them you shall see their for- 
midable Result — Man at almost his full stature at last ! — and 
still growing, visibly growing, while you look. In that day, who 
that hath a throne, or a gilded privilege not attainable by his 
neighbor, let him procure him slippers and get ready to dance, 
for there is going to be music. Abide, and see these things ! 
Thirty of us who honor and love you, offer the opportunity. 
We have among us six hundred years, good and sound, left in 
the bank of life. Take thirty of them — the richest birthday gift 
ever offered to poet in this world — and sit down and wait. Wait 
till you see that great figure appear, and catch the far glint of the 
sun upon his banner; then you may depart satisfied, as knowing 
you have seen him for whom the world was made, and that he 
will proclaim that human wheat is worth more than human tares, 
and proceed to reorganize human value on that basis. 

With best wishes for a happy issue to a grateful undertaking. 

Will Carleton : Brooklyn, June 10, 1889. 

. . . My only way of learning of the Whitman Testimonial was 
through the papers, until my return home yesterday. It is need- 
less to say, that had it been possible, I should have enjoyed par- 
ticipating in that tribute of respect and affection to one whom all 
that read with the soul as well as the eye admire so much. Give 
Walt Whitman my kindest regards, and hopes that we shall have 
a chance to give him a good many birthday dinners yet. . . . 



it LETTER* 

I. 5 -in: /'... v.\ .V.: ; -. 1 55:. 

I have my first chance this morning to think of your kind in- 
vitation, and feel it an honor to be asked to say a word on so 
important an occasion. The few mome:: ; Z was privileged to 
see Whitman, through your friendliness, will remain with me as 
a rare recollection. Such simplicity and such dignity, all the 
more touching because of physical weariness, one does not 
::":tn see blended in I b e fost-rnshing time. I seemed to be 
transported to the times of the old patriarchs, and the large 
utterance of the early gods." Not anything he said, bu: his 
: :" saying it, and the figure of the man, wilJ never be forgotten 
by me. 

Joh>- W. Chadwick: Brooklyn, May 24, i5 8 : 

It would give me great pleasure to assist in doing honor to 
"-'hitman on his seventieth birthday, bat it so happens that 

on the 31st infant I shall be in Boston fulfilling an engagement 
made lour since. I am very sure that in the crowd will be 

there to honor the venerable poet, I shall not be missed, but I 
do not like to miss the opportunity of meeting one whom I have 
long held in reverence. We have had plenty of poets, who 
while imagining themselves lovers of nature, have done their best 
to hide her under pretty words; and we have had pie 
preachers -vhile imagining that they love God. despise his 

handiwork. I love and honor Whitman for his different wa — 
his glad acceptance of the world and all that it contains — his 
boundless faith in N : Man. Immortality and God. May he 
enjoy the -day and mar :o come, ere he goes on without a 

1 

George H. Bokki Ph la Ma :.. 1SS9. 

I have a grea: re r :i for ian, both as a pc^ as a 

noble example of manhood, and I res iv to do 

hing that no 1 to his comfort or his relief. Please to 

:o him my regret at not being able to n e e : m at the 

proposed dinner, from which hard nee. rces me to be 

John A. Cockrill: "World" Offiit, N. V 29, iS 

I : .at my duties prevent my joining with you in your 

proposed tribute to the poet Whitman on his seventieth birthday. 
America owes much to the strong, rugged, virile pen of this lover 
of Man and Nature. Every line that he has written pulsates with 



l - : : 



COCKRILL— CHAMBERS— CURTIS— GILDER, ETC. 67 

manhood, and is sentient with the touch of broad humanity. It 
is gratifying to know that his work is growing in the esteem of 
all true friends of literature, and that his great thoughts will live 
when the jingling rhymes of some of our sweet-voiced poets are 
forgotten. 

Julius Chambers: "World" Office, N. K, May 27, 1889. 

My Dear Good Gray Poet — I have received the word 
which you were thoughtful and kind enough to send me, and 
with it your expression of a desire that I should be present at the 
dinner which your appreciative fellow-countrymen are about to 
give you in commemoration of your birthday. I thank you, my 
dear sir, for your remembrance,, and shall cherish it as long as I 
live. I am a much overworked young man (though only " start- 
ing out in life," as compared with your years of fruitful effort), 
and cannot go to Camden, -much as I would wish to. When I 
say that I respect you, you will understand me ; were I to say that 
I love you, I would only speak the truth. Yours is a great, big 
personality, and your hall-mark on English verse will endure as 
long as the language itself. 

George William Curtis : West New Brightoji, Staten Island, 
N. K, May 26, 1889. 

I am very sorry that I shall be unable to attend the dinner in 
honor of Mr. Whitman's completion of his seventieth year, but 
I wish to join in the tribute to a man who has bravely and quietly 
walked by his inner light, and who has never quitted his belief, 
whenever it was his belief, as Emerson says, "that a pop-gun is 
a pop-gun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm 
it to be the crack of doom." 

Jeannette L. Gilder: "Critic" Office, N. K, May 29, 1889. 

In reply to yours of the 26th, I can only say that Mr. Whit- 
man has always had my best wishes, and they are his for many 
years to come, I hope. When you drink his health, take two 
sips from your glass, and let one be for me to his long life and 
every happiness. 

John Habberton : Fortress Monroe, Va., May 29, 1889. 

I greatly regret that absolute necessity of being in New York, 
Friday p. m., will prevent me joining personally in the testi- 
monial to good old Walt ; but I certainly will try to put my heart 
on paper, to best of my ability, in the old man's honor. 



68 LETTERS. 

William C. Gannett: Hinsdale, III., May 20, 1889. 

May he live as long as loving and being loved can make life 
beautiful to him ! In Mr. Morse's studio I last week saw a noble 
picture of him with his arms around the children. 

H. D. Bush: Lachine Locks, P. Q, May 20, 1889. 

You will doubtless understand, what I can perhaps not explain, 
why I feel such a debt of gratitude towards Walt Whitman. . . . 
I hope to be able to see him some time, and thank him for his 
poems and his life-work, now, I suppose, nearly ended. . . . 
There are many of Mr. Whitman's poems which any right- 
minded person ought to enjoy. Perhaps it is my experience 
with workingmen, and ability to understand and succeed with 
them through my sympathy for them, which enables me to enjoy 
some of the poems which the critics most delight to ridicule ; and 
Mrs. Bush has been deeply touched by his appreciation of music. 
Please give our respectful regards to him, and our congratula- 
tions on his approaching seventieth birthday. 

Richard J. Hinton: Washington, D. C, May 30, 1889. 

My Dear Walt — Let me send my hand and heart to you in 
this pen-scrawl, bearing loving, reverential congratulations to 
you on your seventieth birthday. I'm so glad you are still here 
in your familiar form; the other Walt, the "comrade of all," 
will be among us always. Accept, then, by love, by hopes of 
other birthdays, my fraternal and gladsome kiss and word on 
this birthday. ... I would have liked to have been at the 
dinner, but as I did not know of it till within two days ... I 
could not arrange. . . . My wife joins me fully. 

J. F. Garrison, Cai?iden, N. J., May 23, 1889. 

.... I am particularly sorry not to be able to join with you in 
your expression of respect and admiration for one so widely and 
deservedly recognized wherever the English language is spoken as 
a poet and a thinker of high rank and place among the note- 
worthy poets of the time .... whom also most or perhaps all 
of us have valued not only as a writer, but in the simple 
and unostentatious character of the genial and respected friend. 
But even more than the genius of the poet do I admire and 
honor Mr. Whitman for traits which I am sure he would himself 
place higher than any reputation that his writings may have given 
him 



BY WIRE 



THEN, POSTSCRIPT 



Henry Irving, 71 
Robert G. Ingersoll, 71 
Thomas Jefferson Whitman, 71 
Mrs. A. H. Spaulding, 71 
Mrs. Fanny Taylor, 71 
Felix Adler, 71 
T. B. Aldrich, 71 

J. H. GlLMAN, 71 



H. Buxton Forman, 72 
Daniel G. Brinton, 72 
John Addington Symonds, 73 
Gabriel Sarrazin, 73 



(69) 



[reprint of circular announcing the celebration.] 

Pitman ^testimonial. 



WALT WHITMAN IS RAPIDLY NEARING HIS SEVENTIETH YEAR. 



To properly commemorate the occasion on the arrival of his Three Score 
and Ten Natal Day, citizens of Camden have inaugurated a local demonstra- 
tion which, to make it all the more imposing and fitting as a representative 
gathering of the Friends and Disciples of the POET, will include those at a 
distance who may wish to participate. 

The Committee is already assured that a number of prominent Literary 
characters will be present and join in the ovation, in sentiments predicated 
upon 

WHITMAN'S PERSONALITY AND PRODUCTIONS. 

In order that the Programme may be prepared, it is essential that early re- 
sponses to invitations shall be received by the Committee, which has fixed 
the price of 

TICKETS AT $5.00, 

And provides for no complimentaries, as, in addition to the public entertain- 
ment, it is intended that a substantial benefit shall accrue to the recipient. 

The Dinner will be given at Morgan's Hall, Camden (a large and com- 
modious room), on 

FRIDAY, MAY 31st. 

The hour of 5 O'CLOCK in the Afternoon has been fixed in order to assure 
the personal presence of the Poet. 

The Tickets have been limited to Two Hundred. Application should be 
made at once to the Committee. 

H. L. BONSALL, 
T. B. HARNED, 

Committee. 
Address Camden, N. J. 

(7o) 



BY "WIRE: 



Henry Irving : London, England, June 2, 1889. 

To Walt Whitman — Let me add to the many my respectful 
and sincere greetings. 

Robert G. Ingersoll: New York, May 31, 1889. 

Am confined to my house by illness, and regret that I can't be 
with you to-day. Give my more than regards to Walt Whitman, 
who has won such a splendid victory over the " granitic pudding- 
heads " of the world. He is a genuine Continental American. 

Thomas Jefferson Whitman: St. Louis, May 31, 1889. 

To Walt Whitman — Congratulations on reaching the seventy 
notch. Hope you will complete another score. 

Mrs. A. H. Spaulding: Boston, Mass., May 31, 1889. 

To Walt Whitman — Your many friends give thanks for your 
brave and generous seventy years. 

Mrs. Fanny Taylor: St. Louis, May 31, 1889. 

To Walt WJiit7na?i — Many congratulations upon reaching your 
three-score-and-ten. 

Felix Adler: New York, May 31, 1889. 

To the author of "Calamus," loving greeting to-day from a 
younger comrade. 

T. B. Aldrich: Boston, May 31, 1889. 

Heartiest congratulations to Walt Whitman from his old 
friend and comrade. 

J. H. Gilman : Rochester, N Y, May 27, 1889. 

Sorry that I cannot be present to add my tribute to one whom 
I regard as in some respects the greatest of American poets. 

(7i) 



THEN, POSTSCRIPT* 



H. Buxton Formal: London, Eng.,July 20, 1889. 

. . . For Whitman, so long as there is life, there must be hap- 
piness. The knowledge of what he has done for the human 
race, coupled with his indomitable courage and endurance, 
must make him ever superior to the chances of broken health 
and fortunes. ... At your bidding, I will say a word of what 
I think, though it be but a repetition of what I have 'said before. 
I think, then, that for the poet whose seventieth birthday was 
celebrated on the 31st of May, the word poet needs enlargement 
so as to include somewhat of the meaning of the word prophet. 
Whitman, of all living men, deserves best to be called the prophet 
of the world's hope; for of all he is the most absolute in his 
optimism, the most unwavering in his faith in the ultimate 
perfection of the great scheme of nature. To me he seems to be 
more at one with the external universe, less disturbed about the 
profound questions which the soul strives to answer, than any 
man whose record is before us ; and whatever else " Leaves of 
Grass ' ' may be, I have long held it to be the most original book 
which the world has yet produced, and the book which, of all 
current literature, contains the greatest number of messages to 
mankind which mankind will have to consider whether they be 
found convenient and palatable or inconvenient and unpalatable. 

Daniel G. Brinton : Geneva, Switzerland, July 17, 1889. 

... It gave me especial pleasure to learn that our national 
poet's seventieth birthday had been celebrated in so successful a 
manner, and that he himself is feeling at least no worse in health 
than when I left, and is, as ever, and as he must ever be, so firm 
and so serene in soul. When I was at Parma, I saw a picture by 
Murillo, one of the greatest of that greatest of masters, represent- 
ing Job in his direst affliction, lone, naked, deserted, his pptsherd 
in his hand, but looking up to heaven with an utter faith that I 

have seen in no other painting, and that, as I told , I could 

parallel in nothing else than in those lines of Whitman's on Co- 
lumbus, 

u For that, O God, be it my latest word, here on my knees, 
Old, poor, and paralyzed, I thank Thee." 

I am certain that in these noble words the poet has expressed the 
calmness in affliction which is his own, and though I cannot 
share in the faith which it breathes, I honor and admire any dis- 
position of mind which lifts the maa above his fate. 

* From letters received in last moments. 
(72) 



SYMONDS—SARRAZIN. 



73 



John Addington Symonds : Davos, Switzerland, September 3, 
1889. 

I find it extremely difficult to write anything about Walt 
Whitman : not because I have little, but because I have far too 
much to say. 

"Leaves of Grass," which I first read at the age of twenty- 
five, influenced me more perhaps than any other book has done, 
except the Bible ; more than Plato, more than Goethe. It is 
impossible for me to speak critically of what has so deeply en- 
tered into the fibre and marrow of my being. 

Walt Whitman helped me to understand the harmony between 
democracy, science, and that larger religion to which the modern 
world is being led by the conception of human brotherhood and 
by the spirituality inherent in any really scientific view of the 
universe. He gave body and concrete vitality to the religious 
creed which I had previously been forming upon the study of 
Goethe, the Greek and Roman Stoics, Giordano Bruno, and the 
founders of the Evolution hypothesis. He brought me to at- 
tempt to free myself from many conceits and pettinesses to which 
academical culture is subject. He opened my eyes to the beauty, 
goodness and greatness which may be found in all worthy human 
beings, the humblest and the highest. He made me try to strip 
myself of social prejudices. Through him I have fraternized in 
comradeship with men of all classes and several races, irrespec- 
tive of their caste, creed, occupation and special training. 

Though my energy, as a writer, has been mainly devoted to 
those critical studies for which my education prepared me, my 
life, as a man, has been sweetened, brightened and intensified by 
the Good Gray Poet's invigorating and ennobling influence. 
Before long I hope to publish a collection of speculative and 
philosophical essays, in which the debt I owe him and the bene- 
fits I have received from him will be apparent to all who, like 
myself, call themselves his disciples. 

Gabriel Sarrazin : Parts, France. 

Excerpt from long essay (which see) in the French book, " Poesie Anglaise," pub'd in 

Paris, 1888. 

* * * * "Leaves of Grass," indeed, is outside of being a 
purely poetic work, at least in the sense of the older literatures. 
It is useless to seek here the refinement and impeccable virtue 
of Tennyson. Walt Whitman is not an artist ; he is above art. 
Not only do the words of his verse fail of being the most choice, 
but he laughs at proportion and composition. By " cultivated " 
critics he is charged with affecting the rude, involved, encum- 



74 THEN, POSTSCRIPT. 

bered. The religious and barbaric lyrism which Anglo-Saxon 
poetry possesses in common with the Bible is in "Leaves of 
Grass" interspersed with a multitude of prosaic images, infinity 
of details, and minute enumerations of all points of view. Our 
Latin [Italian, Spanish, French] genius soberly prunes down 
extravaganzas, and knows nothing, ordinarily, of such lawless 
modes of portrayal. It takes them for chaos, and there com- 
mits the gravest of errors. Without wishing to defend exuber- 
ance, or oppose "good taste," it will be permitted me to say 
that this last should only dominate writings which aim at pure 
art, where form is so paramount in importance as to relegate 
substance to the background. Where larger works are in ques- 
tion, however — works wherein all exterior appearances and 
human masses precipitate themselves — where at the same time 
battalions of sensations, sentiments and ideas enter the breach 
— where science and morality and esthetics are fused — where 
such creations are concerned, the horizon widens strangely. 
Then come no other rules save those of nobility and strength of 
spirit; and these suffice amply to create a most unlooked-for and 
grandiose aspect of beauty. The reader may encounter what is 
difficult and distasteful, but it will not alter the fact that, if the 
author has sprinkled through his work a throng of touches at first 
sight prosaic, yet in reality these very touches contribute to the 
poetry of the ensemble. Although they be miracles of chiselling, 
models fashioned of cinder and mud will always remain cinder 
and mud. But overcrowded and disorderly as it may be, if he- 
roic emotion and thought and enthusiasm vitalize it, a work will 
always be of perfect beauty. 



By mail {or express). Address Walt WJiitman, Camden, New Jer- 
sey. Send P. O. draft, payable to W. W.'s order. 

Complete Poems and Prose (1855 to 1888) of Walt Whitman. Por- 
traits from Life. Autograph. 900 pages, octavo, plain binding. Price 
$6 ; (when sent by mail, 40 cents more.) 

Leaves of Grass (small ed'n) includes "Sands at Seventy" and "Back- 
ward Glance." Six portraits from life. Autograph. Full gilt, morocco 
b'd'g, pocket book style. Price $5. 

Several Portraits from Life — photo' d or eng'd — autographs — all well en- 
velop' d. Price #3. 



1904 



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